What is an RSS feed?

orange mouse wired to 3-D RSS feed logo

Let’s say you have five or six websites that you like to follow on a regular basis. You can visit their homepages each day to look for new articles, which can be a time-consuming process. Or you can get the latest updates for every site in one place the moment they’re added. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

That’s the power of feeds.

A feed is simply a list of the latest material added to a blog or website. If a site is equipped with a feed, as soon as they introduce a new article it’s also added to their feed. All you need to do is subscribe to their feed and you get the latest material delivered right to you.

How to subscribe to a website or blog’s feed

Just follow this easy, four-step process…

  1. Get a feed reader or feed aggregator.
  2. Visit your favorite website.
  3. Click the subscribe button either in your browser’s address bar or on the web page itself.
  4. Enjoy the latest updates.

First, you need a feed reader or feed aggregator. There are eleventy-billion different ones to choose from (check out this list of feed aggregators at Wikipedia to see for yourself), but the most popular are:

Most browsers also have built-in feed readers or extensions you can download. Every feed reader has it’s own wiz-bang features, so once you get the hang of subscribing to feeds you might want to try a few of them to see which works best for you.

After you have your feed reader ready to go, visit your favorite website to see if it has a feed. You’ll either see a feed icon in your browser’s address bar like this:

arrow points to the RSS icon in your browser's address bar

Or there’ll be a “Subscribe” or “Get Updates” link somewhere on the web page itself. They both work equally well, so click one of them. You’ll then be redirected to a page with instructions on how to subscribe to that site’s feed. (Don’t worry. It’s really easy and usually takes just a couple of clicks.) And that’s about it. Every time that website gets updated, you’ll see the updates in your feed reader. Simple, right?

Now get out there and start subscribing! (You might want to add Five Finger Coding to your feed reader right now since we were nice enough to demystify all of this top secret, ninja trickery for you. No pressure though.)