First Annual RSS Post

Hello everyone. It has come to my attention that a lot of you don’t know what RSS is or don’t use it so I have designated August 18 to be my annual “Tell everyone about RSS!” day.

Basically, RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”, whichever one you prefer. It’s a standardised way of collecting content and it’s super helpful for staying up-to-date with your favourite blogs, webcomics, whatever.

All you have to do is get an RSS aggregator. I use feedly but it doesn’t matter which one you choose. Then, subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favourite blogs. You’ll get all their updates in one place! You don’t have to check all the websites individually.

It’s not even limited to just weblogs. YouTube channels have RSS, as do deviantART and tumblr, so you can check out your favourite creators without having to visit those sites as well.

This is also a PSA for content creators—make sure your stuff has an RSS feed! Chances are, you’re not fantastic enough to warrant visiting your personal site every day to see what’s new. Having RSS makes it easy for people to check you out.

For example, there are some great people on Vine, but I don’t use Vine so I can’t stay up to date with their stuff. If Vine had an integrated RSS feed, I could just subscribe to them through that. But they don’t, and I don’t care enough to check Vine every so often.