Benefits and Reasons for using RSS
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.
Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.
A variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers.
Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.
Why readers number change every day.
The FeedBurner chicklet represents the number of people who read your blog with some kind of RSS reader in a 24 hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators (including RSS by Email) that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access the feed.
The number goes up and down because not everyone checks their RSS readers on a daily basis. The number generally goes down on weekends because people are out shopping/playing/doing whatever instead of being on the computer. A decrease in the number does not mean readers have unsubscribed from your feed. It just mean not as many readers accessed the feed that day.
Advanced
At first, RSS feeds were mostly used for frequently updated but fixed content, for example, latest articles on a website. Lately, many sites are incorporating RSS feeds for content which can be rapidly changing, like searches or tags. On top of that, there are ways to combine (or blend - hence the cookbook) several RSS feeds into one feed (using RSS mixers), which makes for some interesting possibilities. Here are 10 tricks that I personally use for devouring content from the web.
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Although my RSS Feed chicklet is not showing a high number, I guess now I know why sometimes it goes down.
Now, I am not panic if it has a slight drop.