Richard Flynn :: no comment

If you’ve been using the Web at all during the last eighteen months or so, you will almost certainly have seen the proliferation of advertisements of ‘RSS’ or ‘feeds’. Although many people have attempted to explain what these things actually are and why they’re useful,¹ I’m sorry to say that for the moment this feed thing has mostly remained the preserve of the geek. I’ve tried to encourage people to find out why RSS would be a good thing for them to use, but they’ve mostly glazed over as I begin to explain the whole thing.

So, I thought it might be helpful briefly to sum up in this article why RSS and feeds are useful, and then (in the second article in this series, soon forthcoming) to give some—I hope—clear instructions for you to play along at home, without going into unnecessary technical detail (no one needs to worry about different ‘flavours of XML’, however much some of us might love discussing these things).

Just quickly: ‘RSS’ is an abbreviation said either to be for ‘Rich Site Summary’, or for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. To be honest, it doesn’t matter which one of these expansions you remember, or indeed if you choose to remember either one of these. The abbreviation ‘RSS’ is all that really needs to be remembered. One other thing: you may also occasionally see reference to another kind of feeed (other than RSS), called ‘Atom’. ‘Atom’ feeds are different at a technical level, but we don’t need to worry about that: you can make use of Atom feeds in exactly the same way as RSS feeds.²

But what’s all this ‘feed’ stuff about, anyway?

By using feeds, you can be told when a website (with appropriate feed) is updated. That’s it in a nutshell.

Say, for example, you find a site which you like, such as, perhaps, this one. I don’t update it that often, so you know that it’s not worth your while checking it every day to see when there’s something new. You might bookmark it, but then never come back because—let’s face it—you’re far too busy to think about checking here every few months or so (or less). So you miss out on all the goodness.

But, being a savvy Web user, you see that the site has an RSS feed (in fact, it has several for you to choose from, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here) and so you decide to ‘subscribe’ to the feed. This means that you get the exact address (URL)³ of the feed, and give that address to your ‘feed reader’ (don’t worry, we’ll get back to what that is).

Your ‘feed reader’ is set up to check all of the feeds to which you subscribe every so often (say, every hour). Every time my site is updated, the feed is updated to match, and so if your feed reader becomes aware that the feed has changed since the last time it checked, it is able to alert you to the fact: nothing intrusive, necessarily, but it might be like when you get a new email. (The email analogy is going to come in very useful in a minute, because much of the way you interact with your feeds is similar to the way in which you interact with your email. Hold tight!)

Now, that’s rather boring if you’ve only subscribed to one feed: you might as well just check the website yourself. Why this whole thing is useful, however, is because you can subscribe to many feeds for many different websites: since your feed reader is checking regularly to see if those sites are being updated, you don’t need to think about it. You just check your feed reader every so often and it will tell you if the sites you’re interested in have got new content for you to read/look at. Then you read/look at it. No faffing around, right?

So, in addition to this site’s feed, you might subscribe to the feed of a newspaper, or to the feed for some blogger’s musings,⁴ or to someone’s Flickr photostream (so you’re alerted when he/she uploads photos by thumbnails and titles of said photos), or to the comments section of an article you read on the Web which has sparked a discussion which you want to follow for a few days (after which you can easily unsubscribe), or to anything. If it interests you, if it’s got a feed, then you can subscribe to it and stay up-to-date. It’s perfectly easy to unsubscribe from the feed.

The word ‘subscribe’ when used of feeds is perhaps a little misleading. Normally we use the word to imply that you are engaging in a transactional relationship (sorry) with someone else—e.g. you have to give someone your address and a subscription fee to ‘subscribe’ to a magazine. There is no such two-way relationship taking place when you subscribe to a feed: you just find the address of the feed, and give that to your feed reader. There’s no process of ‘approval’ by the feed’s site-owner, and when you want to unsubscribe you just delete the address from your feed reader, and that’s that.

Does this make sense so far? I hope so. The next article in this series will outline practical approaches to setting up a feed reader and starting to subscribe to feeds, with examples of software for both Mac OS X and Windows. But if you’re confused for the minute, sound off in the comments below.

This is the first article in a short series about the practical use of RSS and feeds by ordinary (non-‘geek’) Web users. The next article will be published within the next week, so check back soon if you’re interested in step-by-step instructions for setting up your own RSS reader and subscribing to feeds.