Ramblings |
A Blog By Aidan Evans |
RSS Feeds and Why They're Great
Post 4 | February 11, 2023
RSS feeds are a great tool for subscribing to online content. In this post, I give some details on what they are and how to use them. They are one of the best ways to keep up to date with news sites and blogs, including mine!
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format for distributing and sharing content, such as news articles or blog posts, on the Internet. It was developed during the early days of the Internet and widely used in the early and mid 2000s. While most Internet users today are unfamiliar with RSS, it's still common for blogs and news sites to have RSS feeds. An RSS feed is essentially a summary of new content with links to the full versions of the content. One uses an RSS reader to subscribe to and read RSS feeds. This allows you to keep up to date with the latest content from your favorite websites without having to visit each site individually. For example, if you're a regular reader of multiple blogs or news sites, you can subscribe to their RSS feeds and have all the latest articles from those sites delivered to you in one place by your RSS reader. This saves you time and ensures you don't miss any important updates or news. Additionally, subscribing to an RSS feed is a great way to personalize your news feed by selecting the content you want to receive --- rather than being at the mercy of whatever news feed is generated for you by Google, Facebook, etc.
I've used an RSS reader for years. This is my favorite RSS reader. This RSS feed reeder allows my subscribed RSS feeds to be synced accross my devices. They have both a Chrome extension and a mobile app. I highly recommend it. The free version allows you to subscribe to ten RSS feeds, which is enough for most people.
If you use the reader I linked above with their Chrome extension, most of the time, all you need to do to subscribe to a website which has an RSS feed is click the extension. Generally, that will let you subscribe. Sometimes you may need to click an "RSS Feed" link or the RSS icon (pictured above). My blog has an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to it by clicking the extension when you're on my blog; if you don't have an RSS reader setup, the feed page will just be an XML file.
Here's a few of the RSS feeds I subscribe to:
- Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science Recent News (see the RSS icon!)
- ACM's TechNews
- Computational Complexity Blog
- Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP (another TCS blog)
- My own blog's feed :-P
-- Aidan
