What is RSS?

You’ve probably heard people referring to “RSS” and you might have seen the subscribe icons on your travels across the web. But what is it and why might you care?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a very quick and easy way to allow users to subscribe to your content. You will more than likely have see the RSS option on websites like the BBC or the Guardian. If a user has a means of reading an RSS feed (e.g. the personalised Google homepage or a RSS reader) they can use this link to suscribe. When they open their RSS aggregator, they will see the headlines of the newest items in all of those locations at once. They can then select what to view at a glance without entering and reading each site separately.

For example, when I log into Google, I receive the headlines for the most recent three articles in a dozen or so newspaper sites. Podcasts, for another example, also use RSS for subscriptions.

Here’s a video on YouTube from a company called CommonCraft that explains what RSS is:

You can get some free RSS readers from these places:

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