What is RSS?
A brief post on what RSS is, and how to use it to be notified when new articles get made; no email address required.
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Table of Contents
You might’ve seen that we use RSS, but what is it exactly? How do you use it?
RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed standard. You can subscribe to an RSS feed, and it’ll regularly update with new articles, posts, or updates. It is commonly used by blogs, news websites, and podcasts.
What’s in a feed?
Section titled What%E2%80%99s%20in%20a%20feed%3FRSS feeds typically contain a summary of the content, along with a link to the full post. This lets users more easily sort through lots of content, see what catches their eye, and go to the post if they’re interested.
Benefit of using RSS
Section titled Benefit%20of%20using%20RSSWith RSS, you aren’t required give an email to a third-party entity. A mailing list oftentimes gets processed by a corporation, like Mailchimp or Sendgrid. They may mishandle your data, and/or experience a data breach.
In order for RSS to give you updates, a reader just needs to visit a URL on the website (like queerwinnipeg.ca/rss.xml). It’ll read its contents, and then display it in a friendly manner. The only data you give is whatever data you give when visiting a website. Pretty private!
The only real privacy risk to using RSS feeds, is that your DNS (Domain Name System) server is leaking to your internet service provider what websites you’re visiting (ie. this site).
If you do want the convenience of having your RSS feed in your email, there are third party services that you can use to have your feed sent straight to your inbox.
RSS readers
Section titled RSS%20readersUsing Thunderbird or Betterbird on your desktop or laptop? Not only are they email clients, but also RSS readers!
On Android, you may want to check out Read You. It’s an free and open source RSS reader following the Material You design language.
For users on macOS and/or iOS, NetNewsWire is a free and open source RSS reader. Its source code can be found on GitHub.
