RSS 101

If you like to collect wisdom from blogs like me, you probably have experienced when: having too many blogs to follow and not knowing when a new post comes out. The primitive manual way to do is regularly loop through the bookmarked blogs to find if there are any updates. Of course, it’s not the way we developer comply with, most of you will think of writing a crawler, automating the process and notify when new content had been published. However, I doubt anyone will bite the bullet to do it. Luckily there is an easier way for you - RSS.

What is RSS?

In plain English

You should have seen this little icon around the web, on many blogs.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”. Think of it as a way to aggregate information (almost only text and a summary of a blog post) from many sources and display them in a single place (RSS Reader, Feed Reader) for your convenience.

Geekier

RSS feed is an XML file that your blog has to serve at a custom path of your choice while the format has to comply with the RSS specification for any RSS feed reader know how to read it. The content requires some tags such as title, link, and description of your blog post.

How can RSS ease your life?

• An RSS feed reader is like a bookmark organizer that allows you to save blogs and categorize them.
• It’s easier to keep track any update on your favourite blogs since any new post will be present to you in the RSS feed reader.

How to use the RSS?

To make it as easy as possible, you just have to choose a good RSS feed reader. Only one advice, do you prefer it to support both web and mobile. Personally, I use Feedly which have both versions.

The RSS feed reader should be smart enough to know where to find the feed provide that you give it the URL to the blog as in the case of Feedly. Otherwise, you will have to find the link to an XML file. If you see the feed icon, then click it. If you don’t see the familiar icon then it’s time to look for the source code. Press CTRL + U to open up the source code in a new tab, look for the keyword ‘rss’, there should be a link for type="application/rss+xml". There you go.

Is it free?

Yes, it is. Most feedreader will have a free plan for you to start with. Even you can host your own RSS reader, there are many opensource projects already on Github for you. Now go and create your RSS list, I hope this post helps you start reading blogs in style.