Adding An RSS Feed
Aug 9, 2023I learnt 📚 about RSS 🗞️ and added it to this site ✨.
As someone who spends a majority of their time consuming content from social media, RSS was a completely new thing for me. I was first aware of it when seeing "RSS" subscribe buttons on dev blogs, which left me wondering what is it? and how can I subscribe to this blog using RSS?.
Unlike the well-known social media platforms (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook), the content a user receives is completely under the user's control. When using web feeds, there are no ads, clickbaits, and algorithms. As explained by Matt Webb:
No-one owns web feeds, so there’s no-one harvesting all the personal data and profiting off it
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, or RDF Site Summary. RSS was invented in 1999 by pioneers at Netscape as part of the rise in blogs in the early 2000s (sources 5, 6).
RSS (also known as web feed, feed, RSS feed) is a web feed that allows users to access new updates on websites in a standardised way. By subscribing to RSS feeds (e.g. feeds from podcasts, blogs and news sites), users can keep track of updates from a number of websites using a single platform called aggregator, feed reader, or RSS reader. The RSS feed provides content via XML while the RSS reader would process the XML.
How do I use RSS?
I find About Feeds site super useful in learning how to use RSS, especially if you are new to it like me! Personally, I've started using feedly. Not sure what I think of it yet, but that's for another post!
How I added RSS Feed to my 11ty site?
I followed this blog post by conr to create an online XML feed for this site. As for ease of access, I added an RSS button on the navigation bar.
What next?
Now that I've started using feedly and have added RSS to this site, I am excited to read other people's writing and, hopefully, for other people to read my writing! ✨ Thank you for reading! ✨