RSS is a very simple and free way for you to receive all the news and updates from the websites you regularly follow in a single page, on your mobile, or your tablet. RSS is one of the most useful and easy-to-use ideas on the Internet. However, despite having been around for a while, its use is not very widespread among most users.
RSS are small files that most websites generate when publishing an update, news, or a new post. These files contain a brief summary of the news and, usually, an image. The user can use a program that is responsible for searching for new RSS feeds and displaying them, so they always have the latest news available without any effort.
First, let’s clarify that the correct way to refer to RSS is Web feed. The Feed is the file we mentioned earlier that contains the news. The confusion comes from the fact that there are mainly two types of feeds, RSS or Atom. There are few practical differences between the two, but Atom is a more modern and superior format to RSS. However, since the RSS feed type was the first to appear, we sometimes still, out of habit, generically refer to all feeds as RSS.
To read feeds, we need a program, which we call a feed reader. There are multiple programs, although the most used is Google Reader (free, of course), which links to your Google account so you can access it from any location. There are also applications for Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone. This program is responsible for checking the feeds of websites for us and monitoring if there are any new ones.
The next step is to tell our feed reader which websites we regularly follow. This process is called syndicating or subscribing. Different readers have a function to add the address of the feed we want to follow. Most websites include the RSS icon, which is a link to their feed file. If they don’t have the icon, we can use our feed reader’s search function to find the address of the file.
Finally, we can group our feeds by categories, for example, hobbies, news, downloads, humor, etc… This way, we will receive news from our favorite newspapers, or when there is a new movie available for download.
