Anyone who regularly navigates to sites with a lot of content will notice a small logo that stands out because of its orange color. This is a link to an RSS feed. We will explain what it is and what you can use it for.
RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. This component allows you to display website content (for example, news) externally in a special structured form.
An RSS feed is a modern form of newsletter. Instead of receiving new articles by email, you can collect all the news you subscribe to in one RSS reader.
This way, you have a quick overview of new and interesting articles without having to visit all the resources separately. If you see a new article in the reader and want to continue reading, just click on the link.
RSS can be used to deliver targeted, structured information from a website in the form of text, images, audio, and video. The focus is on the short delivery of important information that can be compared to news. The user is taken to the actual post only by clicking on the link. All data formats are delivered through the RSS feed.
What is an RSS feed?
The content of a website available in RSS format is called an RSS feed.
Feeds are files whose structure is comparable to that of “regular” HTML pages. But unlike classic websites, RSS feeds are designed for content that is regularly updated.
To be able to use an RSS feed, you must subscribe to it. In general, such subscriptions work with most popular browsers and email programs, sometimes also with audio players such as iTunes or Winamp. There are also special programs for reading channels – readers – that are suitable for managing a large number of subscriptions. Online services such as Google Reader allow you to keep an overview of RSS feeds on multiple devices.
Typical applications of RSS feeds are news sites, blogs, or podcasts where the user wants to keep up to date with the latest events without having to visit the site repeatedly. In addition to RSS, the Atom format is widely used. The differences from RSS are technical in nature in the code structure, and most readers can handle both formats.
In addition to viewing the subscribed feeds, the reader usually lists the headlines from the currently selected feed. Clicking on one of these headings shows a summary of the article, and the next click opens the entire article.