What is RSS (and how to use it)?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a mystery to many people: if you’re one of them read on…

Imagine a one-man magazine publishing company run by a guy called Joe Bloggs. Each month he takes the new articles that he’s written, prints them, puts each magazine in a wrapper, and posts out the magazines. A day or two later those magazines arrive in the mail boxes of the people who have subscribed to the magazine.

Now imagine that Joe has a brother who likes to write on his blog. Sam Bloggs (get it?) wants to deliver his new posts to his readers, so he has chosen a blogging service that provides a RSS feed. The RSS software takes Sam’s new posts, wraps them up, and delivers them to the people who have subscribed to Sam’s blog. Instead of a mail box, those subscribers have some software called a feed reader (which I’ll explain shortly). Just as Joe’s subscribers go to their mail box to see if their magazine has arrived, so do Sam’s subscribers go to their feed reader to see if Sam has written any new blog posts.

What is RSS? RSS is software that takes new content from a blog or website and delivers it to you, as if that blog/website were a magazine and you were a subscriber.

You create a subscription to Joe’s magazine by sending off money, and you create a subscription to Sam’s blog by adding the details of his RSS feed to your feed reader.

What are the benefits of RSS?

Imagine that you are interested in five blogs and the current affairs published by three news websites. Going to those eight websites every day and checking to see if there is any new material is laborious and time consuming, but RSS offers a better way. Instead of going to eight websites you can go to one feed reader and see the new content from all those website there in front of you.

But wait, there’s more! Most news websites have more than one RSS feed, i.e. there’s one for local news, one for world news, one for sport, and so on. This means that you can choose to receive the news that interests you and never see the rest. If sports news sends you into a coma you don’t have to read it.

I also like the fact that a feed reader gives you a list of headlines that you can scan quickly: this lets you ignore the trivial, such as ‘cat up a tree’ stories.

Choosing and using a feed reader

There are two types of feed reader: one lives on the internet (you go to a website when you want to read) and one lives on your computer (you open a program when you want to read). The internet-based feed readers can be accessed from almost any computer that has internet access, as well as many mobile devices.

I use Thunderbird, which is an email program that doubles as feed reader, because I like the convenience of having both in one place. If you want an internet-based feed reader I recommend Bloglines.

When a blog or website has a RSS feed available you’ll probably see the RSS icon in the address bar of your web browser (that’s where you type in a web address). You might also see a RSS icon on a web page or in the side bar of a blog. The most common RSS icon looks like this: – there’s a couple in the left hand side bar of this page.

When you click on a RSS icon (either on a web page or in an address bar) you’ll see a new web address appear in the address bar of your browser: copy and paste this into your feed reader when creating a new subscription.

My favourite web browser is Firefox, and it makes subscribing to a RSS feed very easy. Firefox displays a RSS icon in the address bar when you’re viewing a page that has a feed available, which sure beats hunting around the screen and trying to find out where to click. Also, when you click on a RSS icon list of feed readers appears; just select yours and it the feed will be added to it.

What if a website doesn’t have a RSS feed available?

See my post titled How to monitor a website that doesn’t have a RSS or Atom feed.

Conclusion

If you like to read the latest on several blogs or websites then you could save a lot of time and bother by using RSS. Setting up a feed reader is one of the simpler tasks, and after that everything happens automatically: I highly recommend that you try it.