What is RSS and why should I care?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
askleo.com.
Ask Leo is brought to you in part by the support of my patrons.
If you are one, thank you.
You if you're not visit Askleo.com/patron
to find out more how you can
help and get access to Patreon exclusive content.
Rss, which I mentioned in a recent article, is a technology that actually
makes information publishing very, very easy and adds a lot of power to it.
In fact, if you listen to podcasts, you're probably already using it.
Surprisingly enough, the issue is that RSS
itself, which is something like a couple of decades old, at least never really
caught on in the mainstream, but it is still used widely by a lot
of websites and a lot of more knowledgeable consumers.
What I want to do is talk about exactly
what it is and how you might be able to use it as a way to get information
from the websites and services that you care about, including Ask Leo.
So it all starts with a feed.
In order to support RSS, a website will provide what's called a feed.
A feed is nothing more than a specially formatted file that contains information
about each of the most recent articles that have been published on that site.
That's actually all it really is.
Let's have a look at Ask Leo's feed.
The Ask Leo feed, the RSS feed for Ask Leo is at
askleo.com/feed.
That turns out to be the default feed for pretty much any website that happens
to be implemented using WordPress as Ask Leo is. If you take a look
at that page, if you take a look at that file,
what results is a bunch of what probably looks like unintelligible giverish.
It is in fact a specially formatted file.
It is in XML format, extensible markup language extended to or
customized to provide information in a structured way.
What it includes is information about
the channel, what they call the channel, or in this case, the site Askleo.com
and then information about each of the most recent articles.
In Ask Leo's case.
I think it's the ten most recent articles.
There actually is no definition of how many recent articles should be included.
I know of some sites that include only
the single most recent article, and I know of others that include 20, 30 or more.
The point is that these are the most
recent articles most recent one being shown or listed first.
So what can you do with an RSS feed?
Because obviously it's not really that interesting to look at by itself.
What you end up doing is called subscribing to a feed.
And in order to subscribe to a feed, you use a tool called a feed reader.
Now, there have been in the past,
some very cool feed readers that have fallen by the wayside.
Just because RSS feeds never really went as mainstream as so many of us hoped they
would, but that doesn't mean that there aren't good solutions out there right now.
I happen to use a feed reader called Feedly.
And what you do with a feed reader is you
say I would like to subscribe to and then either give it the site Ask Leo.
Com or if you have the feed url like we just saw
askleo.com/feed, you can give it the feed URL
and then Feedly will grab whatever is in the RSS feed and show it to you,
and it'll manage your own personal read/unread state.
So it becomes a way of reading all
of the messages that are in that RSS feed under your own terms, as you want to.
When a new article is published on Ask Leo, the feed is updated.
The feed reader, which eventually comes around and pulls and asks for an updated
copy of the feed, says, hey, there's a new article here and it shows it
up as unread to your subscription using the reader.
So what makes RSS so useful?
Well, it's another way to collect information from a variety of websites all
over the place and put it all in one place.
So I've got subscriptions to like,
a couple of 100 different websites in my Feedly,
and that allows me to in this one place, know whenever something new has been
published on any one of those sites, it's not email, it's not subject to spam.
This was one of the big things that caused a lot of people to really believe RSS
would succeed where email newsletters have not.
It didn't turn out that way.
But the fact is, RSS feeds are not spamed.
You choose what you subscribe to, you get nothing else.
That's actually kind of nice.
You control your subscriptions.
So, for example,
if a feed suddenly becomes uninteresting to you, if your interest has waned,
you can unsubscribe to it and it just goes away.
There's no downside.
In fact, there's a very good possibility that the person providing the feed would
never know because there's really no notification mechanism.
One day you're pulling the feed from the site into your reader,
and the next day you're not because you're not interested in it anymore.
It's mostly anonymous.
In other words, the feed reader
goes out and gets the information for you and identifies itself as, say, Feedly.
But the fact that you are subscribed to it that you are picking up information
from that particular site probably doesn't make it through.
That doesn't mean that it can't be discovered, and it can't be figured out.
And for all I know, it's very possible that law enforcement
could force it to be taken because, of course, Feedly knows that you're
subscribed to this feed, and even though that information may never
leave Feedly, maybe they could be compelled.
I don't know. But the point is that by its architecture,
there really is no identification mechanism built into it, unlike email.
So how do you know if a site offers RSS.
Well, sometimes you just don't.
Sometimes you have to guess do look for the RSS icon.
Here's a picture of it.
I used it in the article.
You'll usually find it somewhere on a home
page that is usually linked to the site's RSS feed.
Also look for links that say subscribe to RSS.
Look for the phrase RSS.
Sometimes sites will include explicit links somewhere on the page,
maybe in the footer, maybe somewhere else, depending on just how much they've truly
embraced RSS after the delivery technology.
However, sometimes the sites don't even know
that they're providing an RSS feed, which I find kind of funny.
The reason for that is, as I said earlier,
when you implement a site in WordPress, the software that drives something like
a third of the websites on the Internet, WordPress provides a feed by default.
Now, there are different ways to deal with that knowledge.
One is, okay,
just try whateversite.
Com or whatever feed and see if something comes up.
If it does, you've discovered the RSS feed for that site.
On the other hand, it's not always called
feed, and sometimes it's called other things.
And sometimes there are multiple feeds for different things.
A good way to figure out what it is you want Feedly
if you go to Feedly and just enter
the base URL of a site, when you go to add a feed, Feedly will go out and query.
There are mechanisms in place that would
allow Feedly to determine which feeds are available at that URL and then show them
to you and let you choose not only which one, if there's more than one,
but whether or not this is the feed you're really looking for.
In some cases, there just may not be
a feed, and there's really nothing you can do about that.
It's unfortunate, other than perhaps lobby the site owner to create one,
but hopefully by now you've gotten an idea of how useful getting all this information
aggregated into a single place for your consumption really can be.
It beats the heck out of trying
to remember to go visit all these sites to see if they've got something new.
Instead, just visit your RSS reader every so often and it'll show you.
I hope this is helpful.
I hope you find something interesting out of this technology.
It's been pretty life changing for me
in terms of all the information that I try to consume online.
For updates for related links,
for examples for comments and more, visit
askleo.com/138065
I'm Leo Notenboom, this is Ask Leo.com