What are RSS Feeds?

Originally Posted 1/26/23. Updated 11/12/24

A Quick Overview

I think the quickest way to understand what a RSS Feed is is to look at one.

What the hell did I just look at?

So, for most people I think that's going to look like a bunch of jibberish. And that's okay! I just wanted to take a bit of the mystery out of what the feed looks like. The feed above is part of the RSS feed for a podcast a friend and I host called Ixhia (though, neither of us have had much time for it recently). RSS feeds provide information based on what's being posted, to an RSS reader. Technically, you could just look at RSS feeds yourself and figure out the information, but it's much easier/ nicer to use a program that will format things nicely such as Feedly. The most common place you'll see RSS feeds in use is actually with podcasts, though you might not know it. The typical way podcast players update is when there's a new episode, they'll notice there's a change in the RSS feed and update themselves. Programs that will display the feeds you're subscribed to (Like Feedly), also work this way- they keep an eye on the RSS Feeds you're interested in and whenever there's an update, the reader can pull that new information. So in this way, the RSS feed becomes updated as you add new podcasts, or make changes to a blog or whatever you're doing. Then whatever is pulling data from the RSS feed sees there's been a change to the RSS feed, and pulls that new information.

Okay... But how does that code turn into a podcast?

Ah, right. So, in the code above you'll see a line that says "<title><![CDATA[Episode 14: What if Religion Works Like it Does in Dark Souls?]]></title>". When a podcast player reads this data, they know "Oh, the title of this is "Episode 14: What if Religion Works Like it Does in Dark Souls?" and just display that text, rather than the whole code. You can go line by line, and it's pretty self explanatory what each line correlates to (Be it description, episode title, link to the episode, etc.)

How can I use this Information?

One of the main reasons I wanted to talk about RSS Feeds is I'm trying to implement them here on my site as well. If you head over to the main blogs page, you'll see there are links to the RSS feeds per category. The reason I find it relevant to talk about RSS Feeds is because with the mass exodus from Twitter, a question I had on my mind was "okay, how do I follow the creators I'm interested in if they don't have other social media?" Most creators have their own websites, and most websites at least offer the ability to have RSS feeds available. Here on Wordpress (note: this site is no longer on Wordpress), it's as easy as just adding /feed to the end of any of the URLs. The sad thing for me, is most of the creators I was interested in ended up not having websites, or not having RSS feeds available, so I figured I might as well start being the change I want to see.

But there are also other reasons to be interested in using RSS Feeds. Most social media (Certainly the big ones), use algorithms to determine what you should see on their site. This is great for making people stay on the site, but it doesn't feel great from a user perspective, because, at least for me, I'm interested in seeing content from people I follow on the site. Not what an algorithm wants to show me. An RSS feed will always show you things in chronological order, which is usually what people want to see. On top of that, you can kind of create your own custom "Morning Paper" as I think of it. You can subscribe to sources like news, weather, and a host of other things so if you were to just check your RSS feed app in the morning (or whenever), you could get an overview of everything you're interested in, all in one place.

That sounds great, how do I get staretd?

The first thing would be to sign up for an app or service that can take RSS feeds. The most popular is Feedly. From there, looking around online to see if the services you're interested in following provide RSS feeds. Usually there's a little icon that indicates a link to an RSS Feed (Shown below)

There's also a great comic about setting up RSS feeds and giving a brief overview, which is below:

With all the talk about Twitter and social media going on, I felt really inspired to do a comic about RSS feeds. This is a really barebones guide but I hope it helps you stay updated with your favourite webcomics, artists and websites.

— Jey (@jeypawlik) November 29, 2022

And that's really it. Find RSS feeds you're interested in, put them into your RSS Feed App of Choice, and you're good to go. Personally, at the time of writing, I've been using The Old Reader, but there are a host of RSS Feed Aggregator options for you to play around with.

Note: I'm now using FreshRSS.

Ending

What did I miss? Do you have any questions? Anything that wasn't explained clearly enough? Have something you'd like explained? Feel free to send an email to steventanzimedia@gmail.com, and I'll try my best to answer them!