RSS feeds
Automatic notification of new content from all your favourite websites
You’ll no doubt have seen the initials RSS and wondered what it means? What’s RSS and what are these RSS feeds all the cool kids are talking about?
Although there’s some debate, most people agree that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Whatever it stands for, RSS is simply a quite genius technology!
Our favourite websites
We all have our favourite websites. We try to visit these websites regularly because they frequently publish new content we want to read. We ‘bookmark‘ or ‘favourite‘ them in the hope that we might remember to visit them occasionally!
Now, bookmarks are all well and good but you still have to remember to visit the sites in your bookmarks list. Wouldn’t it be easier to automatically be informed every time your favourite websites published new content, the very moment the content was added?
RSS feeds make this possible.
How does it work?
Many websites (especially those that regularly publish new content) will publish an RSS feed. Sounds complicated, but honestly, you don’t have to worry about the technicalities.
Typically, an RSS feed is simply a plain old link, often with the RSS icon next to it — 
. If you’re reading this article on our website, you’ll see the RSS icon in the sidebar, next to a link saying “Grab our Articles RSS feed“. That right there is an example of an RSS feed.
So what do I do with this link?
Firstly, you need some special software—an RSS News Reader. This ‘News Reader’ software (typically cheap, often free) allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds you find on websites.
By the way: ‘Subscribe’ is just a nice, short way of saying: “add to my list of websites I want to be notified about automatically when they publish new content”.
Typically, news reader software is either desktop-based (it works from your own computer, like Microsoft Word or Outlook) or web-based (you visit a website to read your news feeds). I’ll give a few examples of each next.
Desktop News Reader software
- Feedreader (Windows/PC – free)
- FeedDemon (Windows/PC – free)
- NetNewsWire (Mac – free)
- NewsFire (Mac – free)
The advantage of desktop-based news reader software is that it provides a faster, smoother user experience than web-based news readers.
Web-based News Reader software
The advantage of web-based news reader software is that you can access your subscribed feeds on any computer with an internet connection – your data is always synchronised no matter what.
Some news readers have the best of both worlds – both FeedDemon and NetNewsWire have a desktop version but also a website you can log into. They keep your news feeds synchronised so you always see the up-to-date version whether you use the web or the desktop software. Ingenious!
Also, many web browsers (e.g. Safari) and email software (in the case of Apple Mail, for instance) now also have RSS subscription and reading facilities built in too, and this list will only get bigger as time goes on.
RSS is here to stay!
Getting started with RSS
What do you have to do to get started?
First – download or sign-up for a news reader service (see above for ideas).
Then you need to add an RSS feed from a site you want to keep track of. There are 2 main ways of doing this:
- Visit the website whose feed you want to subscribe to
- Find their RSS feed link
- Right-click the RSS feed link
- Choose ‘Copy link’ (or similar)
- In your news reader software choose the ‘Subscribe to new feed’ option (or similar)
- Paste in the link you copied in step 2.
Alternatively, this might work too…
- Visit the website whose feed you want to subscribe to
- Go to the address bar in your browser and highlight the entire URL (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk)
- In your news reader software choose the ‘Subscribe to new feed’ option (or similar)
- Paste in the URL
If the website has been set up properly, you’ll be able to subscribe to all the RSS feeds it publishes.
Note: many websites publish more than one RSS feed. For instance, a news website might publish a main feed (where every single new story is added) but also several other feeds specific to different areas of the site (e.g. Sport or Politics). You can pick and choose which feeds suit your interests best.
Go forth and subscribe
You’ve now got no excuse to miss out on new content from your favourite websites. Here at Definition we particularly use RSS feeds to stay on top of our game in the field of web development and marketing. There’s simply no way we’d be able to keep up with new developments and ideas in our industry if we had to manually visit the sites whose RSS feeds we subscribe to.
And by the way: subscribing to RSS feeds doesn’t mean you won’t ever visit those actual websites properly again. Quite the contrary, we find we actually visit those sites far more than we ever normally would!
What next?
Fancy having RSS feeds incorporated into your own website, to make it easier for visitors to read your content? Get in touch for an informal chat, we’d love to help.