How to use RSS

Last updated: July 12, 2009.

Keeping up with the World Wide Web is amazingly difficult. At the time of writing, there are no fewer than 110 million registered domains (somewhat more websites), with over 92,000 new ones created in the last 24 hours alone. Look through the favorite bookmarks in your browser and you'll probably find hundreds of sites you made a note of but haven't visited for months or even years. However much we might like, it's just not physically possible to visit every website that interests us on the off chance someone might have added something new. How, then, to keep on top of this "information overload"? One good trick is to use RSS: a quick way of being automatically notified every time a website you like adds some new content. Let's take a closer look at how it works!

Photo: Left: RSS is probably the quickest, most efficient way to keep up with the ever-changing world or the Web. This is our RSS feed of new articles as it appears in the Firefox browser. Right: Look out for this orange logo: it tells you when an RSS feed is available.

What is RSS?

Most people define RSS as Really Simple Syndication. If that sounds bafflingly complex (just what is "syndication"?), don't worry, the basic idea really is simple: RSS is an easy way you can be notified every time websites you like add new things that may interest you.

How does it work in practice? Websites that use RSS also publish very small files that list new or changed items they want you to know about. These files are called feeds. Every time a website adds something new, they also add a new entry to the feed. You can set your web browser (or another program called a feed reader, reader, or, aggregator) so it checks a feed you're interested in at regular intervals (once a day or more often if you prefer). This is called subscribing to a feed. Then, when the website is changed, you'll see a new entry in your feed reader with a link to the new material on the site. If the item interests you, you can click the link to see the new stuff. Really simple, eh? You can follow as many feeds as you like and unsubscribe (stop following them) at any time.

Websites that publish RSS feeds typically use one of these icons to alert you to the fact: You can usually click on the icon to browse or subscribe to the feed. Some sites publish a single feed covering all their pages; bigger or more sophisticated sites may publish separate feeds for each of their pages.

Which feed reader?

There are lots of different feed readers and which one you use is entirely a matter of personal preference. Most reasonably new browsers (including Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari) have a reader built in. If you're using Linux,there's a very good standalone reader called Akregator (built for KDE, but you can also use it very easily in Gnome). If you prefer to work online, you can also follow feeds through online services such as Google (using Google Reader), My Yahoo!, Facebook, and so on.

Photo: You can read feeds with whatever reader you please. Left: Our feed as it appears in Google reader; Right: Looking at the same feed in Akregator. The list of feeds appears in the pane on the left; the list of items in each feed appears on the top right pane, with new, unread items at the top highlighted in red. If you click on an item, the text appears in the pane on the bottom right. (It's a bit like an email program with feeds showing up like folders and items within feeds appearing like emails in those folders.)

How do feeds work?

Virtually every serious website publishes RSS feeds these days either in a standard format called RSS or an alternative format known as Atom. Most readers can handle feeds in both flavors and, for the most part, you shouldn't need to worry about the difference.

When you subscribe to a feed, your browser or feed reader downloads a copy of the feed and stores it on your computer. Next time it checks the feed, it downloads the same file and compares it with the stored one. If the two files are different, it knows the feed has been updated. If there are new entries, they're usually shown highlighted at the top of the list. Most feed readers have a whole variety of options you can set. Some will notify you every time there are new entries in a feed (ones with dates more recent than the date of the latest item in the stored feed); other readers are more sophisticated and can be set so they won't notify you if the same page link is posted twice (so you'll find out about new pages only, not changes to existing pages).

How to publish RSS feeds on your website

If you're a web publisher, you can add feeds to your site very quickly and easily. If you run a blog, use a social networking site, or post photos on a site such as Flickr, you'll probably find your page already has an RSS feed embedded into it so other people can automatically be notified of any changes you make.

If you run a website in your own way, you'll need to handle the feeds by yourself. There are various tools you can use that build RSS files for you or, if you're reasonably confident about editing tagged files, simply create your own RSS file with a text editor. It's very easy! Then just upload your feed to your site in the usual way and add a link to it on your web pages (using the little orange RSS icon) so people know it's there for them to use.

We build the feeds for this site in various different ways. Sometimes we simply edit our feed by hand: each time we add a new article, we edit the articles feed and add a new entry on top by cutting, pasting, and amending the previous item. Another way to build a feed is to copy from an HTML file and use a find/replace macro to change all instances of the various HTML tags into corresponding tags in the RSS file. You can see exactly what we've done by comparing these two examples:

Here's the HTML version:

And here's the RSS:

You can see how a few simple find/replaces gets you from one to the other? Just make a little macro to store those in OpenOffice or Microsoft Word and you can instantly convert a snatch of HTML to RSS every time you need to.