XML/RSS

What is RSS?

The technical answer....

RSS is a Web content syndication format.

Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website.

What you need to know for now....

If you're like most surfers you have tons of bookmarks.  But usually you have your favorites for news or work or just general interest.  And isn't a pain to have to go to every site just to see if there is something new of interest to you?  Sure it is.  Well that's where content syndication comes in.  Web sites will publish an RSS feed.  This feed can be plugged into an aggregator.  A news aggregator is a piece of software or a remotely hosted service that periodically reads a set of news/content sources, in one of several XML-based formats (RSS or Atom), finds the new bits, and displays them on a single page.  Sounds complicated and it is, but not for us.  We just use it.

So, if you see this image on a web site it means that the content you are looking at is available in an XML(RSS) feed.  Typically the target URL of that image is what you plug into your aggregator to subscribe to that feed.  Read the help text of whatever aggregator you decide to use on how to subscribe to a feed.

I used to go to cnn.com every morning and fumble through the links to find news of interest.  Now I just subscribe to CNN's "Top Stories" RSS Feed and the headlines come to me!  In fact, your agragator will let you know when new content is available.

Our Feed

We get a lot, I mean a lot of calls regarding close out items.  Everyone loves a bargain.  So we decided that since RSS feeds and Aggregators are the future and are already available as a built-in functionality on most browsers, we should provide an RSS feed of sale items & categories of interest.  This saves our regular bargain hunters a lot of time.  By subscribing to our RSS feed when an item goes on sale, your aggregator will tell you automatically.

Happy Aggregating!