What Is An RSS Feed – Answered With Deep Insights

The question, what is an RSS Feed comes up quite often among tech enthusiast and even experts. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format used to deliver frequently changing web content from websites that regularly publish content (such as news sites, blogs, etc.).

Many news sites, blogs, and other online publishers combine their content with an RSS feed for those who want it. Creating an RSS feed for your blog means that people can connect to your content in various ways and always stay up to date. You can also easily set up your RSS feed to automatically publish to your social media accounts, saving a lot of time and effort!

What Is RSS?

RSS means – really simple syndication but, depending on who you ask, it may sometimes be referred to as rich site summary. At its core, RSS is just simple text files with basic updated information—news, articles, and the like. This stripped-down content is usually connected to what is called a “feed reader” or interface that quickly converts RSS text files into a stream of the latest updates from around the Internet.

What Is An RSS Feed

An RSS feed is read by an RSS reader or aggregator, which can be either a web interface, a standalone desktop app, or a mobile app. The reader aggregates all the RSS feeds that the user subscribes to and presents them in its user interface; this allows the user not to visit each website just to read updates.

Furthermore, this technology has influenced many modern Internet tools that you are familiar with, and its simplified, algorithm-free format can make it your next great tool for reading what you want on the Internet.

According to Wikipedia, RSS is XML-formatted plain text. The RSS format itself is relatively easy to read both by automatd processes and by humans alike. An example feed could have contents such as the following:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>

<rss version=”2.0″>

<channel>

<title>RSS Title</title>

<description>This is an example of an RSS feed</description>

<link>http://www.example.com/main.html</link>

<lastBuildDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:01:00 +0000 </lastBuildDate>

<pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:20:00 +0000</pubDate>

<ttl>1800</ttl>

<item>

<title>Example entry</title>

<description>Here is some text containing an interesting description.</description>

<link>http://www.example.com/blog/post/1</link>

<guid isPermaLink=”false”>7bd204c6-1655-4c27-aeee-53f933c5395f</guid>

<pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:20:00 +0000</pubDate>

</item>

</channel>

</rss>

The RSS feed is delivered in XML format, which ensures maximum compatibility between readers. Reading software could use the XML structure to present a neat display to the end-users.

Before RSS feeds were introduced, websites sent email notifications to subscribers about new content. However, this was not optimal, since some emails might end up in the junk folder or mix with other emails, as well as the fact that they were formatted differently. In contrast, the RSS reader represents all channels using its own interface.

CONCLUSION

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. For most webmasters or bloggers, it is a technology that updates ‘RSS Readers’ when new content (such as a articles/post) is uploaded. Many refer to it also as a news feed.

CREDIT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/24756/rss-feed