Does Geocaching.com Have An Rss Feed?

[+EthicalEgoist]

I know I've become smitten in recent days with RSS ("really simple syndication") technology, and can't live without my feeds at the office. Does Geocaching have a RSS feed, maybe by region? If not, it might be a good idea.

[+MarcB]

This has been brought up before and I think it may be in the works.

MarcB

[+Ed & Julie]

I give up...what the heck is it???

[+PandyBat]

I didn't know what it was either so I looked it up. Sounds like something similar to those little lines that run across the bottom of CNN showing the latest news. Only this is for changes on websites....not sure.

 

A short explanation:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

 

RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.

 

This page also tells you how to make your own:

http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175271

RSS is a method of distributing links to content in your web site that you'd like others to use. In other words, it's a mechanism to "syndicate" your content.

 

To understand syndication, consider the "real world" situation where artist Scott Adams draws a daily Dilbert cartoon. The cartoon is made available to any newspaper that cares to run it, in exchange for a fee -- and 2,000 papers in 65 countries do so.

 

Unlike Scott Adams, syndication of web content via RSS is unlikely to make you rich. However, it can be an easy way to draw attention to your material, bringing you some traffic and perhaps a little net fame, depending on how good your information is.

 

What Is RSS?

How does RSS syndication work? Say you publish a new web page about a particular topic. You want others interested in that topic to know about it. By listing the page as an "item" in your RSS file, you can have the page appear in front of those who read information using RSS readers or "news aggregators" (explained more in my sidebar article, RSS: Your Gateway To News & Blog Content). RSS also allows people to easily add links to your content within their own web pages. Bloggers are a huge core audience that especially does this.

 

What does RSS stand for? There's a can of worms. RSS as introduced by Netscape in 1999 then later abandoned in 2001 stood for "Rich Site Summary." Another version of RSS pioneered by UserLand Software stands for "Really Simple Syndication." In yet another version, RSS stands for "RDF Site Summary."

 

History buffs might be interested that there's been some rivalry over who invented RSS. This is why we have both different names and indeed different "flavors" or versions of RSS. Mark Pilgrim's written an excellent article, What Is RSS, that charts the different versions with recommendations on which to use. I'll also revisit the version choice you'll need to make. But first, let's look more closely at some basics of what goes into any RSS file.

[+DomHeknows]

its touted as the replacement to email. You run an application on your pc - often like outlook (or an addin to outlook even) that polls to see is the "rss feed" has changed. Basically this is a file on a website with the latest changes/news/articles. You subscribe to these feeds and your application polls to see if they have changed once an hour,day,week month etc.

this way from one application you can immediately find out what new caches have been visited by someone, new tb's found in your area, the latest news on your favourite news website, the latest news from your friends blog etc etc etc.

I use it to keep up to date with about 100 websites,each with feeds, that take me about 20 minutes to read - compare that with trying to open 100 web pages and work out whats changed.

www.intravnews.com www.feedreader.com www.bloglines.com are just some of the readers available.