RSS or Really Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. It is something which let you know that a given website is updated or not.

Every blog has a feed, even mine (see the top right of this page). With an RSS feed you can keep subscribed to content such as news, comics, or blog posts. With the help of Google Reader one can view easily the feed updated at one place, which gives the knowledge about the topic (specific), one want to read for or subscribed. All the latest news and update can be traced from one place Google Reader where you can save your RSS Feed.

RSS Role in Internet

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed’s URI or by clicking an RSS icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved from as early as March 1999, it was between 2005 and 2006 when RSS gained widespread use, and the ("") icon was decided upon by several major Web browsers.

How to Add a RSS Feed in Google Reader

To add a feed, copy and paste the link from your desired website. I do this by right clicking on the RSS icon (like the one shown above) and select “copy link address”. I then go into Google Reader, click “Add a subscription” and paste it into the box. Click Add.

If you type in just the website address, Google can usually find the feed for you, but often sites have more than one RSS feed so it pays to select the right one.

Now that you have the website in your reader, you can check up every now and then to read the latest haps. It’s part of my daily ritual, along with checking my email.

Some websites only give you part RSS feeds, which means you have to click the link or post title to be taken to the site for the full article.

By simply clicking on a post you have “read” it. There’s a few other options in Google Reader, such as marking all as read if you want to tidy up in one fell swoop.

If you get a lot of feeds you can then organize them into different folders. For instance I have several folders set up including a news folder, a games folder, and personal blogs folder.

Now you have the feed which is used to read the updates of the important websites. Don’t add unnecessary stuff as it will take your time to go through, the one you are looking through. Just ignore such feeds.

Process to follow:

1. Start with adding my RSS Feed

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechStroke

Then start adding your favorite feeds.

Some of mine are:

Linux:

LINUX For You Magazine

Linux Journal – The Original Magazine of the Linux Community

Software:

Beta News:

google.com/reader/view/feed/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.betanews.com%2Fmnn.php3

PC World:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.pcworld.com%2Fpcworld%2Fdownloads%2Fweekly

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

http://www.whatisrss.com/

Receiving the Web Traffic is the very essential part for any website .The most important aspect of owning a website is the amount of visitors you receive.With WordPress this can be done easily by using some usefull plugins without  any knowledge about the SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Here are some popular SEO friendly plugins .Using these Plugins to your blog  should help you to building traffic for your website.

All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, SEO Friendly Images

The All in One SEO Pack ,Google XML Sitemaps and SEO Friendly Images are commonly used SEO plugins .The  All in SEO Pack is the most popular plugin for wordpress which comes as default in WordPress.

Sociable

Sociable is a plugin that capable of  automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages, and in your RSS feed. There are 99 different sites to choose from. Giving readers a way to share your content on social bookmarking sites is a great way to catch the attention of new readers and increase traffic to your site

Headspace2 SEO

Headspace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to define tags, keywords, descriptions, page titles, and more for posts, pages, and categories on your site. It supports many add-ons as well, like Google Analytics, Statcounter, Feedburner Stats Pro, and CrazyEgg heat map.

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site. It can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories, and tags. You can also set up your own keywords with a set of matching URLs to get your blog interlinked.

SEO Slugs

This WordPress traffic builder plugins removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, and ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO. Removing these common words and phrases makes your post titles more search engine friendly.

The slug is generated once you save your post, so you can always view or change it before publishing.

If you own a Web server or a VPS and would like to see how quick it is at delivering your website pages and how efficient is it’s response time then you can try the following cUrl command from any other Linux Box and test your results, while this test will give you response time of your own website , you can still compare it with response time of popular websites like nytimes.com and lifehacker.com to get an idea of how much you lag behind them ( You can be quicker in response time too , if you have a mighty server !! )

So, just login to your shell and type this

curl -o /dev/null -w "Connect: %{time_connect} TTFB: %{time_starttransfer} Total time: %{time_total} \n" http://yoururl.com/

change the yoururl.com  to your own URL which you wish to test , and then test it for other popular websites like twitter, mashable or some other not so popular websites and see the difference.

Terminology

Connect : Time taken by cUrl to connect to the site ( dependent on your client Server’s bandwidth and Network )

Time To First Byte (TTFB) :– Time taken to receive first byte after connect ( How quick your Apache is , lower the value the better )

Total time : The last data is the total time for the site to finish loading. (Largely due to your PHP/ any other server side language performance )

So have fun, testing your Website I will write more about Website optimization and Apache, PHP as I have just shifted to a self managed VPS and I keep on learning new things and new ways to optimize it .

Need to type in Hindi on any website that does’nt allows transliteration ( the way you write in orkut and gmail and Blogger ie. “kaise ho” turns to कैसे हो ) , well  then you can also act smart and write your message in blogger/orkut/gmail and then copy paste it to website where you want  transliteration

{ Type in Hindi }

Now, all you have to is just Drag and drop the above link “Type in Hindi” to your Bookmark bar , see in the image below,

Now, whenever you need to write in Hindi on any page using a normal english keyboard, just first go to that page , and once it is loaded click on the bookmarked link that says 

[अ Type in Hindi]

and yuo will see a message saying Transliteration loading and once it is loaded , you can see that typing into a text field automatically converts the words into hindi ,

You can try writing Kaise ho , tum kahan the , main tumse milne aaonga  and other such hinglish word and you’ll see they automatically get converted to hindi counterparts . Quick and amazing tool 

Friends, you must have tried numerous ways to download videos / mp3 by using various plugins for firefox or other softwares or websites that did this for you , but now I am going to tell you a method that looks techie but is really easy and can help you download anything, YES you heard me right, just Anything off the internet so may it be any Video, audio , mp3 or any other streaming stuff from any website I’m not just talking about youtube or dailymotion or any other video sharing site but rather  for any site , even if they are using their custom player and stuff .

Procedure

1. Get  Fiddler – it’s a HTTP debugging proxy ( Dont worry about the name , you dont have to do any debugging with it )  and then Install and run it .

You will see a screen like this

2. Now the actual concept is that Fiddler can see every website and file  that you open from Internet on your web browser or even inside any other software , now we would use this fact this way that we will open a website containing media ( video suppose ) then we will also keep a look on fiddler window for all the files that are being downloaded . Now when you press play on the video /mp3 and it begins to play ( stream)  you will see that fiddler window would have  many rows of all the connections that took place , all you have to do is find out the row that shows a Downward Green arrow constantly while the video/mp3 is playing

NOTE – While you open Website pages a lot of such rows would be created , to get rid of them just click on Remove-> Remove All  at the top toolbar menu . So as soon as you  reach the page which has the video/mp3/flash just  click on remove all once to clear all rows and so you can easily find the actual link without looking for it among large no. of rows .

So in my case I opened a Youtube  page and  I pressed on play and then I looked on Fiddler , and there you can see the Highlighted yellow part is the actual link  as the arrow is green constantly and the Body column has value = –1

I will soon make a video tutorial for this . If any of you guys have problems while doing this just ask me in comments .

Here’s the Video tutorial as promised , have a look

Bid Swish is a visual way to search ebay for auctions, and you get a collage or a grid of thumbnail  images of ebay auctions relating to the keyword you searched and you can then go from here to actual ebay page by  double clicking on a particular item .

I liked this app, although I have not done any shopping on ebaY , but this looks visually appealing and useful , although from my own perspective this app is not so polished that it should be , like the graphics used are not so web 2.0 like or glossy etc. rather they give a outdated feeling and hover effect is slow, so seems like this app was made in  hurry . Anyways try it 

http://www.bidswish.com/

People create strange but sometimes useful apps and web apps, now this one is similar to Google but for sounds .

Actually , FindSounds is a new and revolutionary sound search website that allows you to search for various types of sounds , examples of the various types are listed below .

Animals alligator, baboon, bat, bear, bobcat, buffalo, bullfrog, camel
Birds blackbird, blue jay, bluebird, bobwhite, budgie, bunting, canary, cardinal, catbird
Holidays Christmas sleigh bells; Halloween creak, creature, evil laugh, ghost
Household aerosol, beer, blender, blinds, boiling
Insects bee, cicada, cricket, insects, katydid, mosquito, wasp
Mayhem arrow, artillery, attack, battle, bomb, bullet, broken glass, cannon
Miscellaneous ambiance, bang, beep, blip, bloop, boing, boop, button, buzz, cartoon noises
Musical Instruments accordion, agogo, banjo, bass, bass drum, bassoon, bongos, brass
Nature cave, earthquake, fire, forest, geyser, jungle, lava, lightning, ocean, rain, storm, stream, surf
Noisemakers alarm, alert, beeper, bell, buzzer, chime, foghorn, horn, siren, slide whistle
Office briefcase, cash register, coins, computer keyboard, computer printer, desk bellSports and Recreation arcade, ball, baseball, basketball
Tools axe, broom, chain saw, construction, drill
TV and Movies Tim Allen, Beavis and Butthead, Bewitched, Bionic Man
Vehicles airplane, ambulance, bicycle

Phew.. , that was huge but I was impressed by search quality and as they say ,

we process more than 2,000,000 sound searches for more than 300,000 users.

So just try it out and post your experiences in comments , also post the searches you made .

You can easily make yourself look like a fool or some weird creature from an alien species if you have ever tried stretching your face image using some advanced photoshop/ image editing  softwares, but this service at  StretchYourFace allows you to achieve the same funny effect online, so no need to use image editing software just launch this website upload your photo and have fun, better try this with your friend’s photo and once you are done you can save it or even email it to your friend ( A good way to tease someone ! )

See how this Mr. Doggy was stretched to perfection .

Also you can embed that app in your own website ,like I have done here

Hope it makes you lot happier and your friends more angry ..

It feels frustrated when after lot of searching  you find what you were looking for, but when you go there the Website is unavailable or temporarily down or under maintenance. In this situation you have two ways to see that we page or website

1. Search for it on Google and then just locate the cached result ( highlighted in yellow),click on it and you will find a cached copy of Website from Google cache even if the website is down

2. You can also try the Wayback Machine a service by archive.org and it has pages from previous years for many websites, so just look for your website here

These two methods are the most prominent and important in locating an article or content ven after the Website has been shut down or it is out of order .

Hope it helped …

I just saw this Web service known as QuarkBase even though it has been in existence for long, so what it actually does is that it provides all the available information about a website from various other websites so basically it is a web mashup and it proves very useful for any webmaster,SEO expert or anyone who’s just interested about any website/Blog and wishes to know about it’s stats,ranking,links etc.

It shows who owns that domain , traffic rank, popular articles from that blog/website on Digg,Delicious,Stumbleupon and countries where it is famous in ( you can see the reports for techstroke.com above in the snapshot .