RSS feed and the importance of

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and the newer and upcoming ATOM (Atom Syndication Format) are essentially tools that can make the life of an internet surfer much simpler. Especially if this individual has multiple websites they view on a regular basis that change frequently or the content gets updated frequently. The tools that utilize RSS and ATOM are referred to as feed readers. There are several different brands of these feed readers and what they do is give you one place to gather new and updated information from your favorite websites (Collins, 2018). This is where the value lies; for example, let’s say that you have 10-15 websites that you read daily and in doing so, you have to manually go to each website, dig through the areas you normally go to and look for new content or updated content (Collins, 2018). A feed reader resolves this issue because it has one interface that lists everything you are subscribed to and you can see all the feeds that you are subscribed to at one glance (Collins, 2018) and see which ones have been updated. There are very many uses for this and the first thing that might come to mind is blogs and forums, but there are many other uses besides just these. According to Gill (2018), you can subscribe to RSS feeds for dangerous weather alerts, specific news topics or celebrities, websites that have information about your favorite hobbies, new photos that professional photographers are posting, even politics, jokes and currency exchange rates. Furthermore, you are not just limited to matters such as these; you can even set up a feed to notify you of job postings that meet your criteria and even create a feed on shopping or auction sites like Craigslist that will notify you when something you are looking for shows up that meets your search criteria instead of having to go to the site and search manually every single time (Collins, 2018). Essentially, if you spend a lot of time on the web on multiple websites, then RSS/ATOM and a good feed reader might be for you.

References

Collins, J. (2018). What everyone should know about RSS feeds. Retrieved from https://www.lifewire.com/rss-101-3482781

Gill, P. (2018). How RSS works and why you should use it. Retrieved from https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-rss-2483592