What are RSS Feeds?
An article explaining what RSS Feeds are.
1/12/20252 min read
I’ve heard of RSS feeds for years but never looked into them. I imagine they would have been very useful with all the webcomics I was reading back in the day. I decided to do some research about them and share what I found here.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, previously known as RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary until 2003 with the release of RSS 2.0 standard. It was originally introduced in 1999 by Netscape and reads XML files. XML is a markup language for storing and transporting data, with no predefined tags and no focus on how the data looks. It’s platform agnostic so it can be used on Windows, Apple OS, Linux. There are a couple of XML Udemy courses covered under the Udemy Premium Plan so I think I’ll be taking one of those eventually (my Udemy course list is getting longer and longer every day - I love learning!).
The RSS feed updates in real time and the top item is the most recently published article/website/comic, etc. It will have a title, description and link back to the original content. If you’re an avid internet user, this could save quite a lot of time! I’ve been manually doing this sort of things for decades. Signing up for email newsletters, checking daily (or weekly) on websites of interest.
It keeps track of what you have and have not read. It has an aggregator that checks the websites for new content. An aggregator is a website or software that collects information from internet pages of other websites and puts it on a single website.
When you want to add a website to the RSS feed, some websites have a small orange icon you can click. It will have the letters RSS or XML. If that isn’t there, you can also search for the website within the RSS feed you’re using.
There are six existing RSS Feed Readers or Aggregate Apps: RSS Feed Reader Browser Extension by Feeder.co, Feedly, NewsBlur, Inoreader, Flipboard, The Old Reader and Feedreader Online.
Why use a RSS Feed? Riverside.fm mentioned it might be a good alternative to relying on social media for your news articles/updates, etc. It is a decentralized and unfiltered way to get updates on the content you care about. I’ve had a hard time in recent years getting Facebook page updates that I care about to show up on my Facebook feed.
Thank you for reading this article about what an RSS feed is. I’ve always been curious what RSS feeds were but was always too afraid to explore the unknown terrain. Now I feel more confident about using them. I think with today’s social media feed mess; it would be a good idea to get back to RSS feeds, so you don’t miss out on the information you actually want to see.
References:
How Do RSS Feeds Work? | RSS.com Blog - Podcasting and Beyond
What is an RSS Feed: Complete Beginners Guide - Riverside.fm
