What are RSS feeds exactly?

As explained in my New Year post, I'm going to talk a lot about RSS feeds this year.

Way too many students and researchers don't know what RSS feeds are or how to use them and this must change!

So, what are RSS feeds? Here is a short video that explains it quite well:

For those of you who'd rather read the explanation rather than watch a video, let me sum up what it says.

You probably have several websites you enjoy visiting on a regular basis. To know if something new was published on one of them, you go and visit each of them one by one.
With RSS feeds, you collect all of this new information in one spot.

RSS means "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary". It allows you to subscribe to a variety of content over the Web. To do that, you set up a feed reader (like Feedly or The Old Reader for example). To subscribe to your content, you can use the RSS button you found on your favourite website (the orange thing on the left). Or you can subscribe automatically by doing a search in your RSS reader.

Once you've subscribed to a website's feed, your reader will automatically grab any new information that is published and display it for you.
You can also easily unsubscribe from any feed you're not happy with.


Next time, I will show you exactly how to do that with an example.
But for now, do you have any questions? Write them in the comments below and I will be very pleased to answer you!