RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are a very useful and yet almost completely overlooked feature of the Internet. It's a real shame, since I love the way in which they work and can be used to track many different sources of information without subscribing to a million different websites, all with individual accounts and logins.

So, what is an RSS feed? In really simple terms, it's a way of collecting and displaying posts from the Internet in one feed 'reader', usually as shortened links. In more complicated terms: "RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it."

Some computers have RSS readers built in, and many web browsers can have them installed. If you would prefer to use a browser based reader, there are sites like Feedly (which I'll be using as an example).

RSS feed URLs typically look like: http://www.[website name].com/feed. They can sometimes be tricky to find, and don't always follow this pattern, but luckily for us, Feedly is a little more user-friendly.

To add a feed to Feedly, take the URL of the blog and paste it in the searchbar, like so:



And pick 'RSS' from the choices given (Atom will also work, and in practice, they are very similar).

You will then see a collection of posts from that blog in a shortened format, like this:



All you have to do is press the green '+feedly' icon, and then you're done!

Now you can track content from your favourite blogs, news sites, forums, webcomics etc. without joining a mailing list. What's more, since they're all collected in one place, it's much easier to check for new updates than loading a lot of different webpages whenever you remember to check!