Rss feed how does it work

It was used by web publishers to display their website content on My. A few months later, Netscape simplified the technology and renamed it to Rich Site Summary. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile.

Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Coletta Teske Whitehead. Coletta Teske is a Lifewire writer focusing on consumer electronics. She has 30 years' experience writing for Adobe, Boeing, Microsoft, and many others. Twitter LinkedIn. Updated on November 13, Jon Fisher. Lifewire Technology Review Board Member. Article reviewed on Mar 15, Tweet Share Email.

Browsers Chrome Safari Firefox Microsoft. In This Article. The aggregator has the task to go through each feed, note new updates and return additions in a chronological way for users to peruse.

If a certain title catches your eye, simply click on it and go to the relevant site. RSS is intuitive, ubiquitous and deeply benefits your site on several metrics — visibility, audience and traffic. If your initial reaction is, I must have this on my website — this is where you will find actionable advice on how to generate an RSS feed. WordPress sites are truly blessed in this regard since the platform automatically generates an RSS feed. No additional steps are required. Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, and Radio — and other blogging platforms — automatically create feeds as well and simplify the process on the creator side.

The story is a little bit different for authors of custom sites. Authors are required to generate and update XML files manually. Many opt for a specific tool for the job and authors are spoiled for choice as there are several applications, paid and free of charge, such as Software Garden, FetchRSS and RSS Builder. Websites, which prioritize readership engagement and the cultivation of return readers, advertise their RSS feeds readily. Speaking of aggregators, some programs come straight away with an available list of RSS feeds for the most visited news sites, to which you can subscribe.

Classic RSS is cycling out of fashion and as a result websites tend to keep their RSS links available within their code rather than anywhere on the site itself. In Inoreader , simply type the domain of the website you are trying to subscribe to. If it has an RSS feed we will try to find it for you. Doing it manually while in Chrome is also as straightforward as it gets and it requires you take a quick peek under the hood and into the source code.

It takes two steps to complete:. At first glance, it may appear as though RSS has become completely obsolete — a relic of a by-gone era — but nothing truly dies on the Internet. Instead, RSS is seeing a resurgence under a new format much better suited to the current informational landscape.

RSS solutions are stepping away from the catch-all approach and adapting to specific services. This practice is already gaining traction with YouTube, Reddit and even weather updates. This brings to our next point — RSS has outgrown browsers.

The less people use RSS the likelier it becomes to see a wave of similar announcements from other browsers. Hire a Zapier Expert to help you improve processes and automate workflows.

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A while back, I was scrolling through Twitter and came across this post:. I was confused—RSS hasn't disappeared. I use it every single day. It's an integral part of my workflow that helps me stay up to date with news, come up with new ideas for content, gather sources to cite in my posts, and keep my inbox clean. What is RSS? How to use RSS feeds. Keep track of blog posts, YouTube channels, and podcasts. Receive email newsletters in your RSS reader.

View social media accounts from an RSS feed. Discover newly-posted jobs. Create email newsletters automatically. Create social media posts automatically. Monitor brand mentions. Do something with what you've read. An RSS Really Simple Syndication feed is an online file that contains details about every piece of content a site has published.

Each time a site publishes a new piece of content, details about that content—including the full-text of the content or a summary, publication date, author, link, etc. Since it's updated with details about every piece of content a site publishes, you can use RSS feeds for things like keeping up to date with every new article your favorite blog publishes or automatically generating email newsletters or social media posts to promote your new content.

If you're used to looking at code all day, you might be able to make sense of this as easily as you can read formatted content on a website. But for the rest of us, this looks like a lot of nonsense. Ten years ago, when RSS was more popular, nearly every website had an RSS icon that linked to its RSS feed, making it easy for people to subscribe via their preferred reader. Today, that's rarely the case, but the absence of an RSS icon on a site doesn't mean you can't get that site's content via RSS: Read our tutorial on how to find the RSS feed for almost any website for more details.

With the right RSS reader app, you can get an RSS feed from just about any blog, podcast, social media account, or email newsletter you want to follow.

But RSS works the other way around, too. It doesn't only pull content into an RSS reader; you can use it to push content to sites and apps as well. Or if you want to move forward with Feedly, check out our tutorial on how to add an RSS feed to Feedly. Following your favorite blogs is the simplest way to get started with RSS, but it's just one of the many benefits RSS offers.

Here are eight ways to use RSS feeds to consolidate the information you care about and automate your work. You'll need a Zapier account to use the workflows in this piece. If you don't have an account yet, it's free to get started. I read a lot of blogs. As a writer, staying up to date on what blogs—in both the industry I work in and those I write about—are publishing is a great way to learn new things, come up with new ideas for topics to write about, and find studies that are worth linking to in the posts I write.

Subscribing to the blogs I follow in an RSS reader delivers each of those benefits. Rather than having to visit each publication's blog individually to see if new content has been published, I see all of the new content from all of the blogs I'm interested in within a single interface in Feedly.

When I log in to Feedly, I see a list of all of the sites I follow that have published new content since the last time I reviewed each feed, along with a count of the number of pieces of new content that have been published since my last review.

I can click any feed to see the content I haven't reviewed, click through and read any specific piece of content I'm interested in, and then click a Mark All As Read button to clear all of the new articles from Feedly so that the next time I log in, I only see content I haven't viewed before. But you can use RSS for more than following blogs.

You can also use it to see new podcast episodes and new videos posted to your favorite YouTube channels—all from within your RSS reader. A lot of times, subscribing to an RSS feed for any type of content is as simple as pasting the URL of the page a blog homepage, podcast episodes list, YouTube channel homepage, etc.

If an RSS feed exists for that page, you can subscribe to it immediately. You can also use Zapier to create custom RSS feeds so you can collect all your reading material in one place.

Here are a few things to try:. But if no RSS feed exists, you're not necessarily out of luck. Instead, you can use RSS.