RSS

RSS is an acronym for a set of XML feed file format variants used for syndicating time-stamped content from web sites like blogs and podcasts, and sometimes a shorthand for feed file formats as a whole including Atom, or even more broadly for the concept of feeds or syndication in general.

For the concept of an RSS reader see:

feed reader

RSS as an acronym has been used to mean: RDF or Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication.

Why

The most widespread use of RSS feeds may be to distribute podcasts. The addition of an enclosure element to the specification for RSS 0.92 passed the web address of an audio file to an aggregator. RSS feeds are the channel through which aggregators such as Apple Podcasts receive information about podcasts.

RSS formats are fairly widely used, from news sites to blogs (both self-hosted and services/silos), through e-commerce or classified sites such as Craigslist, though there have been shutdowns in recent years.

See feed file for a list of RSS formats and those often lumped in with RSS.

Many internet users rely on RSS to keep track of websites. Having an RSS feed makes your content more discoverable to your target audience because visitors do not need to manually check your site for new posts.

How To

Create your feed

If not using tools that generate a feed for you, you can create one with RuSShdown, a RSS Feed Generator.

Link to your feed

RSS feeds can be automatically discovered by feed readers if the homepage contains a link to it in its head:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="example.com articles (RSS)" href="/feed.xml"/>

The title is important if there are multiple feeds linked, e.g. category and comment feeds.

Style your feed

You can use XSLT to make your RSS feed human-readable when it's opened directly.

IndieWeb Examples

Main article: RSS/IndieWeb_examples

IndieWeb Examples publishing RSS on personal websites have been moved to a separate page

Alternatives

Instead of publishing or consuming RSS:

Publish h-entry in your HTML. See https://indieweb.org/ for more
Consume h-entry, e.g. with a microformats2 parser
Use a tool like unmung to convert RSS into h-feed.

When using such alternatives, you should consider RSS or Atom's ubiquituous nature. Very few readers support Microformats at this point, compared to the thousands of self-hosted RSS feed readers.

Projects & Tools

Ryan Barrett's granary fetches and converts Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+ data to and from RSS, as well as other formats like ActivityStreams and microformats2 HTML/JSON.
RSS Bridge PHP web application which can generates a web feed for a website without one.
- Officially hosted instance rss-bridge.org/bridge01/
js-rss-reader Javascript tool by tsxyz. Parses and display contents of an RSS feed on a webpage. Used here and here to display toots.
RSS Lookup - tool to detect RSS feeds
Kill the Newsletter - tool to convert newsletter emails into RSS feeds

Offline

This section is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.

Silo Examples

Many silos offer RSS feeds for different kinds of content, but the details are not always easy to find. The projects above give access to feeds from some silos.

Silo examples offers specific information for several silos.

Issues

Problems Consuming RSS

There are many known problems consuming RSS feeds. See feed#Criticism for an extensive listing.

Ambiguous Usage

Use of the term "RSS" in conversation, whether online or in-person, has been ambiguously and interchangeably used to mean:

RSS 2.0 in particular (implying all other versions of RSS aren't actually RSS, or are ignorable, or both)
RSS feed files of any version
RSS feed files of any version AND Atom feed files of any version
as a synonym for a feed file of any format

Items appearing as new again

When the GUID for an item in an RSS feed changes, old items that have already been read will appear again as new. With a podcast feed, this means software will try to download episodes you've already listened to again.

gRegor Morrill: I've experienced this several times with podcast feeds. Some of the feeds have 50 episodes in them, so suddenly my podcast software is trying to queue up a lot of episodes I've already heard, and I have to manually remove them.