Archive for August, 2009
There has been some heavy competition in the website syndication arena and we just wanted to clarify some questions that people have about which version/protocol that is the most effective for you and your website. It seems that the use of different protocols for web site syndication has confused some and made many not sure which is the “right” choice for their own web site syndication needs. RSS has been around longer than any other web site syndication service, however when the Atom publishing service came out, there was a lot of discussion about how it may eventually take over as the standard for newsreaders and web site syndication alike. Atom boasted a more robust and scalable platform for website syndication and also allowed for links and images in your feeds.
When the internet giant Google, adopted the atom feed as the default on the huge blogging site Blogger.com many thought that the days of RSS were already gone. This has added to the push for more use and acceptance of the atom feed protocol, but has it actually taken hold for good?
Which Protocol Can My Feed Reader Accept?
Feed readers have become pretty much open to either form of web site syndication. Now you can read either format with most feed readers and if you are using a feed reader that does not accept one or the other, you can always go to feedburner.com to convert your RSS feed to atom or atom to RSS. So no matter what type of a feed a site offers you can always get the newest content using any feed reader of your choosing.
Of course, it has been some time since this technology has come out and it is now just in it’s infancy stage, but has never become more popular than RSS. RSS has actually grown and become as powerful if not more powerful than the atom publishing protocol. RSS now can display links images and even videos in some cases, so the advantages of use the Atom protocol for web site syndication have pretty much dissolved.
Many websites do accept both types of feeds, however RSS still remains the Internet standard. The atom publishing protocol started off strong because at the time it actually offered more features than RSS. However, as newer versions of the RSS protocol have been released, it quickly caught up with Atom.
RSS or Atom?
So the quick answer is still RSS, but you may want to make sure that your website feeds are still available in both formats to make sure that your readers can get updates from your website in their preferred format. As far as news readers and feed aggregators go, you can use either for the most part, but Atom feeds usually are more likely to display full posts and pictures in the posts automatically.
To Success,
Nick Simpson
