RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. That definition is about as helpful as ‘a blog is an online journal’. At the risk of making us all feel stupid, with this post I will attempt to explain it like I would if you were a friend here in my living room. Oh wait, you are a friend here in my living room.
You have to use a reader to get RSS feeds. Readers automatically search for new postings from all of your RSS subscriptions — then, when you want to, you log into your reader to read all or some of them. Bloglines and Google Reader are two I have used, they are both easy to sign up for and use. And, yes, they are free.
If you read a large number of blogs, using a reader makes it much quicker. If this is the only blog you read, it could still be quicker to use a reader – it lifts the content out of the “wrapper” here, thereby removing most of the slow-loading elements.
The orange box is the RSS icon. If you click on it, you should get a page where you can select the reader you wish to use to subscribe to the blog.
Now, as to why Nordstrom is offering RSS, it’s a customer service. You can now subscribe to one of their feeds and have new items “delivered” to your RSS reader. Unfortunately it does not appear that you can subscribe to a search; for example, I just tried to subscribe to all 70% off items that come in size 2 and was told there was no feed. Oh well.
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yes it was helpful 🙂
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Su
Rebecca– what you would probably need to do is to use something like Yahoo Pipes. You can take the feed and search for keywords and only get something delivered to your RSS reader if it matches your criteria.
I don’t know if it could get as detailed as 70% off for size 2– also depends on how many times those things were there– but it is handy. I do this when searching for a couple of keywords, and for the RSS on my site that lists posts from all contributors. I’ll be looking for more ways to do this kind of thing in the future.
Hey MIn, I will have to look into that. Is it like google alerts? Deborah sent that suggestion along with her submission to the modesty carnival. She has hers set up to alert her when someone posts on modesty.
I heard that Google just opened up a mashup, but that it’s not as pretty as yahoo pipes. Alerts is something totally different. Pipes can specify all sorts of things like keywords, dates, and the like. It’s much more powerful than alerts.