Wizz RSS Help

From Wizz RSS Help

1 Introduction
2 Using Wizz RSS

Introduction

Why Do I Need a News Reader?

A news reader, like Wizz, can speed up your search for interesting new articles from your favorite web sites.

Many web sites publish special web feeds containing headlines and summaries of current articles. A news reader gathers and displays headlines in a compact list. These lists are quicker to retrieve and read than the full web page. Web feeds can be found on many news sites, blogs, and e-commerece sites.

It may be called Wizz RSS News Reader, but that doesn't mean that it can only read RSS feeds. The name is a legacy from the early days when it could only read RSS feeds. Today, it also does a pretty good job of reading Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 feeds.

The concepts of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), as the name implies, are actually really very simple. RSS is nothing more than XML in a specific format (Actually a few different formats but I'm not going to get into that. Of course the same also applies to Atom). If you'd like to learn a bit more about RSS, Atom, Podcasting etc., I have provided a few links on the menu under What is?

So now that you know a bit about RSS and Atom, what does the XML actually look like? Following are a few links to live RSS feeds: -

So what role does Wizz RSS News Reader play in all of this?

Wizz RSS News Reader is only one of many available news reader clients or news reader aggregators. In very simple terms it is a piece of software that sits between you (The reader) and that ugly XML. The news reader client/software attempts to turn that ugly XML into something that is "human friendly", providing easy access to the data presented in the XML and to any of the information linked to it.

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