Carbondale Blog and RSS Class

OCTOBER MEETING: Blogs and RSS FeedsMon. Oct. 9thLappala Center Carbondale 6-8 pm
Following on the heels of our September meeting on the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are the related topics of blogs and RSS Feeds. Weblogs or blogs are personal websites consisting of regularly updated entries displayed with the newest entry first. They read like a diary or journal in reverse chronological order. Blogs are a type of web content typically created by independent writers although an increasing number of reporters for media companues are creating blogs on magazine and newspaper websites. Some blogs are personal journals and others resemble newsletters or columns. Blogs often contain links to other sources of content, which is why blogs are strategically important to an SEO campaign.
Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging".
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a lightweight XML format for distributing news headlines and other content on the Web. XML is short for Extensible Markup Language, designed especially for Web documents. It allows designers to create their own customized tags, enabling the definition and transmission of information (like news stories) to appear on another computer, such as, on a website. In other words, news stories would automatically appear on your website using an RSS feed. RSS feeds are strategically important to SEO campaigns because they plant constantly changing sources of content on your website, something spiders view favorably in ranking websites.
How do RSS feeds work? A Web site can allow other sites to publish some of its content by creating an RSS document and by registering the document with an RSS publisher. A web publisher can post a link to the RSS feed so users can read the distributed content on his/her site. The content is usually a list of hyperlinks, along with other information, or metadata, that helps viewers decide whether they want to follow the link. RSS allows a person's computer to fetch and understand the information, so that all of the lists that person is interested in can be tracked and personalized for them. RSS is an alternative means of accessing the vast amount of information that now exists on the world wide web. Instead of the users browsing websites for information of interest, the information is sent directly to the user. All Digital Media Club meetings are free and open to the public.
The speaker, Roy Brandt, is an adjunct professor at Colorado Mountain College and currently teaches website design at the Spring Valley campus of Colorado Mountain College. Roy has designed websites professionally for the past eight years. For several years Roy has taught classes in digital video, Photoshop, and website design at CMC.
For more information about the Digital Media Club, contact: Roy Brandt at 970-404-1623

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