home > computer room > RSS intro
It's like a social network's news feed, but you can get updates from lots of different sites without making an account on any of them. Or, like an e-mail newsletter, except you don't have to give anyone your e-mail address, or worry about how hard it'll be to unsubscribe if you decide you want to.
An RSS feed is a text file on a website. You can read it with any feed reader software, made by anyone.
Give your feed reader the link to each site you want updates from, and it'll download the latest posts from them. Posts usually show up in reverse chronological order (newest posts first), though some software gives you other options.
Then, you can start reading! Most software can automatically download new posts from here on out, and it's usually just a push of a button to get updates if not.
(Note that there's something very similar to RSS called "Atom". Almost any software will work equally well with both, though, so the difference probably won't matter to you.)
First, you'll need a feed reader. There are lots of options, but here are a few:
Then, start adding some feeds! All of the programs above can take a regular link to a website and tell you what feeds it has. In a few weird cases though, this may not work, so here are some tips for finding the RSS feed on a website should you ever need to.
You can follow anyone who's set up a feed for their own website, plus anyone on most blogging sites (like Wordpress, Write Freely, or Blogger). Some social networks also let you follow folks via RSS--Mastodon, Youtube, Reddit, and Tumblr are examples.
I personally just start with checking sites I already like for feeds, but if you want to actively seek out some, feedle is a pretty good search engine for that.
Check out this guide to making an RSS feed to get started! The one thing I'd say differently is to use ".xml" as the file extension, rather than ".txt" (from a technical standpoint, it probably doesn't matter, but it's nonstandard).
If you want more detailed information, here's an explanation of the feed format.
This page is adapted from Back to the Future With RSS! by Nicky Case. Both the original article and this one are public domain (CC0).