What is RSS?

RSS, which stands for Real Simple Syndication, is a technology used on the web, primarily on blogs, to broadcast a blog's updates to the Internet. For people who subscribe to an RSS feed, using an RSS “reader” software will provide them with updates from the blog or website when new content is posted or updated.

What problem does RSS solve?

Using RSS allows people to see what's new on a website without the need to subscribe to emails and have a flooded inbox. The headlines of new articles are visible when the reader looks at their RSS reader software or RSS mobile app. It solves the problem of keeping up-to-date without the need to receive emails.

The RSS feed does not contain all of the new content, usually just a headline or a snippet of information to help the reader determine if he wants to read more. If so, then clicking on the link for the article takes him to the Blog or Web page where the full article appears.

One way to keep up to date with new articles published on a website is to subscribe to an email list that sends you a message anytime something new is posted. Subscribing to updates this way might be OK if you visited one or two websites or blogs and they only published something new once a week. You wouldn't have more than a few emails from the websites coming in each week, and it would be manageable. But what if you wanted to keep up with new articles from a few dozen or more sites? RSS helps you keep up to date without the need for emails.

Instead of signing up for an email update, you can subscribe to the website's RSS feed. To do this look for a “subscribe” link or an RSS Feed icon and click on it. This is what the symbol looks like:

When you “subscribe” to the RSS feed, you don't get emails sent to you every time there is an update from the site. What will appear is a list of articles from all of the websites you subscribe to when you use your RSS “reader.” So let's look at what applications are available for subscribing to RSS feeds.

RSS reader software

At one time the only way you could subscribe to RSS was to use a separate application called an RSS Reader. Some web browsers and email services support RSS, but in my opinion, the best way to subscribe to RSS updates is to use a dedicated RSS reader application.

The advantage of a dedicated RSS reader is that you all of your RSS subscriptions are in one location and you can keep all of your RSS feeds organized across your desktop and mobile devices. You can also organize your feeds into folders and save specific articles for other applications for future reference.

One of the most popular RSS reader applications is Feedly, available at feedly.com. Feedly is available as a website and mobile app for iOS and Android. Feedly also integrates with over 200 other apps which enable you to quickly share or export an article you find to another application.

The website digg at digg.com is another popular RSS reader since it pulls RSS feeds from all other the Internet to create a feed of updates from sites that their editorial team has selected. Digg has it's own reader app called digg reader which is available at digg.com/reader and as an iOS and Android app on the app stores. You can type in the name of any website into the digg search box, and it will display the RSS feed from the site. The digg reader allows you to add feeds from the digg directory to your account which may save you time in finding useful RSS feeds and save you time searching for useful sources of news.

Firefox and Safari come with built-in RSS readers, so you don't need a separate application to subscribe to an RSS feed from a website and Chrome has several add-ons that allow you to read RSS feeds.

RSS is the radio of the Internet

Think of RSS as the radio of the Internet. Like a radio, there has to be a station that creates a broadcast (that's the website with the RSS feed.) To listen, you need a radio receiver (the RSS reader) and the frequency (the RSS address) for any station you want to hear so you can tune to the right station. Radios also have an on and off switch. When your radio is off, it's silent, when it's on, you can hear the broadcast for any station you've got set on your tuner. If you don't have your RSS reader app open, it's like having the radio off, when you do open it, then "tune-in" and see the updates from the "stations" you follow.

Sites with RSS addresses

Not all websites broadcast RSS so you may not always see a subscribe button or RSS symbol. Those sites that do have RSS are most commonly blogs. Blogs (short for web logs) are online periodical publications. Since blog authors create new articles and publish them on the site, readers can stay up-to-date by subscribing to the blog's RSS feed.

The RSS button and subscribe links link to a web address that is the site's RSS address. Click on these buttons on a site, then copy and paste this web address into your RSS reader. Using an RSS reader like Feedly, mentioned above, allows you to search for a website and if it has an RSS feed, it will appear in the search results, so there's not even the need to copy and paste the address into your reader.

If you have a website, knowing the RSS address is helpful since you can use your RSS feed to automate the publishing of articles to your social media accounts. Blogs usually have an address for RSS includes the site domain name and ends with a /RSS.xml or /atom.xml suffix. The format appears as www.yourwebsite.com/rss.xml, just replace the RSS with atom. While many RSS feeds use a standard RSS format, there is another industry standard format called atom. Both RSS and atom are industry standards that are widely used and supported by virtually all RSS readers, so having one or the other for your website is OK.

Social Media

Because most social media sites use RSS for posts and status updates, Blogs have become the choice for anyone trying to publicize anything since all blogs come with RSS feeds. There are many add-ons for blogs that allow you to automatically publish the headlines from your blog to your social media to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn accounts.

Many site owners post more frequently on their social media accounts, and using the RSS feed for the account; they can display their updates to their website or even from one social media account to another.

Hootsuite, dlvr.it, buffer, IFTTT, and Twitterfeed are some of the most popular tools for automating the sharing of content from one RSS source to another destination. 

To my way of thinking

Using RSS lets you catch up with updates and websites from any computer or mobile device that uses RSS reader apps. By using RSS, it's possible to subscribe to many updates and view them when it's convenient for you. Also, it doesn't clutter your email inbox with new email.

For site owners or marketers, understanding and RSS can keep you on top of the latest news in your industry or occupation and save time by using content you've created in multiple locations, which is what the syndication means in RSS.

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