RSS

Really Simple Syndication

In a nutshell, it is a content feed subscription service.

It is widely used for: - News - Blogging - Podcast/broadcast

You subscribe to RSS feeds and it essentially becomes a hub for you to browse, consume, process news and data. For example; you may subscribe to CNN US news, your favorite bloggers, also some podcasts.

RSS feeds are come in form of URL, there is no dedicated standard for the URL, it could be a subdomain, a subdirectory, top-level domain, anything.

It works like IMAP protocol, it fetches new entries from your feed subscriptions on a regular basis, or whenever you manually refresh.

Publishing

This section is dedicated to publishing and becoming an RSS feed provider.

RSS feed providers are responsible for providing this up-to-date feed via an XML file.

There is a whole specification to XML structure and properties:

• Include CSS
• Images
• Icon

Subscription

This section is dedicated for consuming/using RSS.

Readers

As an end-user, you may use an RSS reader to read RSS content.

Popular ones: - Thunderbird - Feedly - The old reader - InoReader