When news disappears from search results and social media favors polarization, RSS keeps you in touch with news sources you trust.

How would you structure a feed for syndicating blog content? Remember, it would need to be standard enough for a computer […]

(Or so.)

The home of a developer community specialist.

Happy 6-year blogiversary to me! 🎉 To celebrate I want to talk about other peoples’ blogs, more specifically the magic of “blogrolls”. Blogrolls are “lists of other sites that you read, are a follo...

The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful. What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS.