What Is an RSS Feed? Formats, Readers & How to Subscribe

What RSS Actually Is

RSS is a way of publishing a website’s newest content in a format that other software can read for you. A feed is a plain XML file, served with the MIME type application/rss+xml and usually saved with a .rss extension. Inside it you’ll find a channel title, a description, build and publication dates, and then a list of items — each item carrying its own headline, a short summary and a link back to the full article or episode.

Because the structure never changes, a feed reader can pull that file every hour and show you exactly what is new, all in one interface, without you opening twenty different tabs or handing your email address to twenty different newsletters. That is the whole point: you subscribe to the content, not to the marketing.

You will see these files described as “RSS channels” or just “feeds”. The first version of the standard appeared around 1999, and it took off strongly through the first half of the 2000s as blogs, news sites and podcasts all adopted it.

Three Names, One Family

The acronym has meant different things depending on which generation of the standard you are looking at, which is why documentation online can look contradictory:

RDF Site Summary — the 0.90 release and the later 1.x line, built around RDF.
Rich Site Summary — the 0.91, 0.92 and 0.93 releases that most early blogs used.
Really Simple Syndication — version 2.0, the one that took over and is still by far the most common today.

A separate standard called Atom was created later as a cleaner alternative, and it is widely seen as RSS’s eventual successor. In practice the two are so similar that almost every modern reader handles both without you ever needing to know which one a site publishes.

How To Read A Feed

To make use of RSS you need a reader — software whose only job is to keep checking your feeds and show you the latest headlines. The largest group are still desktop apps you install once: NetNewsWire on Apple devices, Newsboat if you live in a Linux terminal, Capy Reader on Android. On the web side, self-hosted options such as FreshRSS and Nextcloud News work in any browser on any operating system.

Subscribing is the same everywhere. Right-click (or long-press on a phone) the orange feed icon, choose Copy link, then paste that address into your reader’s Add feed box. Many readers will also let you paste the ordinary website address and will hunt down the feed for you automatically.

Why It Still Matters

Feed reading among everyday users dropped noticeably after 2013, and the closure of Google Reader is the reason most often quoted for that decline. But the technology itself never went away. Publishers still publish feeds, and podcasting — which has grown enormously — runs entirely on them. A podcast is, underneath, an RSS feed with audio (and now video) files attached, which is exactly how episodes are pushed out to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon Music from a single upload.

Newer extensions collect under the banner of Podcasting 2.0: chapters, interactive transcripts, live items and direct listener support, all travelling inside the same open feed rather than behind a platform wall.

Feeds Worth Following If You Sell Online

For a multichannel seller, a feed reader quietly replaces a lot of manual checking. Marketplace announcement pages, supplier news, courier service updates and the blogs of people who write about Magento and M2ePro all publish feeds, so a single reader window can tell you what changed overnight across a dozen sources — without a single notification email landing in your inbox.

Our own RSS feeds work the same way. Subscribe to the blog feed and new tutorials, articles and course announcements arrive as you publish them. Subscribe to the podcast feed and every new episode is waiting in your reader, ready to download before your commute. Add the forum feeds and you can keep half an eye on the topics you care about, whether that is M2ePro configuration, eBay item specifics or Amazon listings.

Set it up once and it keeps working silently in the background. No algorithm decides what you see, nothing is marked as unread by someone else, and if you ever want to leave a feed you simply delete it.

If you would rather learn by watching than by reading, the Magento video tutorials pick up exactly where this page leaves off.

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