Why rss feed

Before we go anywhere near the significance of RSS or its legacy within the Internet landscape, it behooves to define RSS — to be on the same page as it were. What RSS does is reduce the content of a website to base components generated within simple text files.

In the early days of the Internet, RSS incorporated only text elements, but as the capabilities of the web increased, RSS followed suit. Keeping true to its minimalist presentation of information, RSS nevertheless incorporated more media such as videos and images. All this information would then be streamed into a single feed managed and edited by the user. Users are able to select the websites they frequent most and build a one-stop feed to review their favorite content. Simplicity is key in order to understand RSS and explain its popularity during the initial boom of website creation and content proliferation.

Using RSS feeds is intuitive and felt native to the early informational ecosystem. The need to curate our feeds still exists to this day and how RSS did it at the time was to separate RSS information into a single file on a website, which is coded in XML.

Whereas the regular content posted on a page can be read by people, the RSS information is read by a program — the RSS aggregator — and presented in a chronological order of newest to oldest. Description: Descriptions can vary in nature. Sometimes, a website might provide a summary of the article or update in question. More often than not, users can access articles in their entirety in the feed itself complete with all additional media content in the body of the post.

Link: A direct link to the article or post, so that users can read it on the website proper. To put it simply — RSS creates order out of chaos. Without an RSS service, readers have to hop from website to website to check on new posts. Not only does it waste time, but captures readers in a tiring loop. Email subscriptions are always an option, yet you run the risk of drowning your inbox with emails that you never open and directly delete.

Another option is to rely on social media channels to keep up with content. The chief benefit is that social media is not as obtrusive as email notifications but tends to be unpredictable as to what articles and posts become popular and thus more likely to pop up on your feed. RSS ticks off all convenience boxes. It allows you to deep-dive into the content of your selected websites without missing an update.

RSS eliminates the burden on users to remember all the websites they want to visit. Interest in RSS feeds has gone down over the past several years. Online brands already have to post to social media for their marketing goals, and they may not want to take the extra time to convert content into a bunch of RSS files.

This added effort is why a new blog or website may only offer subscription content by following them on social media, but no RSS feed. However, RSS feeds still have their place.

Additionally, RSS feeds are often very easy to read at your leisure and will update even if you are not online — they are particularly useful for catching up on the news during your downtime. As such, RSS feeds have grown into a beneficial tool, thanks to the emergence of well-crafted mobile apps that act as feed readers. Feedreader is a simple, minimalistic reader that makes curation easy with basic categories and accessible tools. Feedly can be used for entertainment and professional purposes for example, following competitors and keeping up on industry news.

It has a simple interface with basic categories to collect individual RSS feeds and a home page filled with the latest news from everywhere. Feedly is currently one of the most popular feed readers online, although it was the victim of an attack in Flipboard has won admiration for its beautiful design that looks particularly good on mobile devices. While it still enjoys some social elements, its core function is bringing you an easy to parse and organize news feed with support for tablets, desktops, and mobile devices.

To accomplish this, first, navigate to the desired feed by using the search function and typing in a few search terms. Click the button in the bottom-right corner to become a subscriber. It required a lot of maintenance, and no one used it. Once you've found one you like, put it on one of our Best Tablets or Best iPads for easy reading on the go. Inoreader offers a well-designed readable interface, good search and discovery options, and a nice set of features that are both beginner-friendly and offer plenty of options for advanced users.

There's a web interface, as well as iOS and Android apps. Inoreader handles more than just RSS feeds—you can add email newsletters, Facebook pages, Twitter searches, and podcasts too.

Advanced users will like extra features like keyword monitoring. Enter your search terms and Inoreader will search all your feeds for any mention of that keyword or phrase and then create a feed of just those articles. You can also do the opposite and hide articles matching a phrase. Inoreader also offers a nice automation system you can use to create rules and filter your feeds, giving some higher priority.

For example, you could get a push notification every time WIRED publishes a new review, but not the rest of our content. The automation does require a pro account. Pro accounts also get some other nice features, like the ability to integrate with IFTTT and Zapier, an offline mode for the mobile apps. You can watch YouTube videos in Inoreader, and next time you log into YouTube, you won't have a ton of unwatched videos.

Inoreader offers a free with ads account, which is good for testing out the service to see if it meets your needs. Feedly is probably the most popular RSS reader on the web, and for good reason. It's well-designed, easy to use, and offers great search options so it's easy to add all your favorite sites.