m00se's Blog

If you are looking for a way to stay up to date with the latest content published on your favorite blogs (and not only [1]), visiting websites through a browser is not the optimal approach. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) [2] is an established technology which can make this process more effective and enjoyable.

What are RSS feeds?

RSS feeds are simply XML [3] files hosted on a server, which get updated every time some new content is added to the related website. These feeds can be edited manually, however a lot of Content Management Systems (CMSs) offer automated RSS integration whenever a new content gets published.

Feeds can be fetched using RSS feed readers. Personally I use the Thunderbird one as I like to keep my feeds close to my emails, but there are a plethora of other ones [1] from which to choose from. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, your reader periodically fetches the specified URL and notifies you if there is new content. The frequency of this fetching process is usually a parameter that you can specify in the reader configuration.

RSS feeds can contain either the full article or a only a preview of it and the link to the full article. Personally I prefer when the entire article is included, so that the whole content can be read without relying on an external web browser and without loading any javascript.

Using RSS changes the way you consume content on the web, by allowing you to create an "inbox" from your favorite websites. Instead of using a polling approach in which you manually check every website you are interested in, you get notified whenever there is an update. This makes it less tedious and less time consuming.

Additionally, it also brings privacy and usability improvements with respect to newsletters, as you don't have to provide your email to anyone and you can unsubscribe from feeds at anytime without having to rely on the compliance of the service provider. Unsubscribing from an RSS feed simply means that your feed reader will stop fetching it. The RSS feed provider does not know or store any of your information, the only information he can eventually log is your ip.

A more in depth analysis of the implications of using RSS can be found in this great article [4] by Tobias Franke.

How to find RSS feeds

RSS feeds are identified by their URL. In the optimal scenario, websites supporting RSS usually have this image or a link to the feed somewhere in their homepage.

This is not always the case, but there are a few tricks that can be used to get a feed:

Check the source code of the page through your browser, and search for the keywords: rss, feed, atom (will explain later what this one is). Often times website generators used by the site owner automatically maintain RSS feeds, but they are not aware of it or they do not want to display it on their homepage.
RSS feed generators. There are some services which monitor a target website for you and generate RSS feeds that can be fetched. I personally never used them, but here is one for example.

Making newsletters obsolete

Once I got accustomed to reading articles through RSS feeds, I did not subscribe to newsletters anymore. I do not want to depend on a third party to be able to cancel my subscription, and I do not want them to store and use my email for other purposes.

Luckily there is kill the newsletter [5], a very useful free and open source project which provides you with a bogus email with which to subscribe to the newsletter and forwards all content received on that email to an RSS feed. This service can also be self hosted [6].

Atom feeds

The Atom Syndication Format [7] was created in 2005 as a replacement of RSS. For what concerns content consumption it can be considered equivalent to RSS, as most decent feed readers are capable of parsing both. There are however quite a lot of differences between them, which you can check out here [8] if you are interested.

Bonus: follow Github projects using Atom feeds

Atom feeds can also be used to stay up to date with new developments of Github projects. Github provides Atom feeds for commits, releases and tags. For example these are the Atom feeds for Kill The Newsletter:

The URL of the feeds is standardized, therefore by substituting owner and project name in these links you can obtain feeds for whichever github repository.

My RSS feed

The RSS feed of my website can be found here. Happy reading :)