Once when I was in college, I told my friend about this interesting website that talked about different crafting ideas. Awesome, she told me. I will add to to my art related list of RSS feeds. RSS feed? What was that, and what was its function? It took me until a few months after that to really understand.
What is an RSS feed? RSS stands for rich site summary, though it is often called really simple syndication instead since this more accurately describes what it does. RSS aggregates real time information from different websites and presents any updates it receives in a single, unified format. This might sound complicated, but it is actually quite simple.
For example, say you follow seven artist websites. You want to see any new art they post, but you do not want to have to check each website every single day, especially when they all update on different weekly schedules. Instead, you can add all the urls to your list RSS feed. By checking on the RSS once a day or however often you want, you will know which sites to go to, and when, without having to go to every individual location.
In this way, RSS feeds lists serve many functions. It may not surprise you to learn that News sites often use RSS news feed lists. Since News sites focus on providing the most up to date information to viewers, it makes sense that they would prefer a formatting application that allows them to display the latest news completely automatically.
Most websites, actually, are RSS compatible, and provide their own RSS feeds for readers to follow. If you do a quick search on a list of RSS feeds, many examples of RSS feed lists created by popular websites will come up. These list of RSS feeds are helpful for both the websites and their viewers. If you like a video website, for example, you can follow their rss feed of top funny videos. You get the content you want, and websites are able to increase via a list of RSS feeds the amount of traffic they direct around their site.
