An RSS Feed is a rather straightforward, old-school way to access the contents of a website. Many sites use an RSS feed for blog entries … but we use it for Events.
RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary”, although some people call it “straightforward syndication.” In our case, we’re syndicating our events entries so you can access them through your browser without having to access our website directly.
If you’re interested in setting an RSS Feed in your browser, follow these steps:
You may be able to add an RSS Feed Reader to your mail client, and there are standalone RSS Feed Readers for Windows and Mac as well.
One of the advantages of a browser-based RSS reader is that you’re notified in your browser that a new entry has been added to your feed.
Here’s what this looks like in my Chrome browser. The RSS Feed icon is “pinned” to the address bar. If there’s a new post, it displays a number/count of new (unread) posts.
Click on the Feed icon and it will show a list of the feeds to which you’re subscribed:
Finally, when you click on one of the feeds, you’ll see the details of each item. If you click on the item, you’ll be taken to the website where, if all goes well, you’ll get more complete information.
Although “old school,” RSS feeds provide you with easy to use summaries of information that you have expressed an interest in. An RSS feed is clearly about saving time. Clearly, one of the biggest timesavers is when you have multiple feeds from different sites — you can see all the posts you’re interested in, all in one place.
If you see an RSS icon, click on it to display the “XML” feed data for the site. Copy the address from your address bar into your RSS reader.
2. If you don’t see an RSS icon, that doesn’t mean that the site doesn’t have an RSS feed. In fact, all WordPress sites automatically create an RSS feed for blog posts. This feed is located at https://domainname.com/feed — that is, simply append “/feed” to the site’s primary URL. If you see an XML document with data in it, determine if that’s what you want and then add the address from the address bar into your RSS reader.
An example of this is at https://grovewx.com (Cottage Grove Weather) doesn’t currently have an official RSS feed, but the site is a blog site developed using WordPress, so it’s RSS is located at https://grovewx.com/feed.
Pretty simply, right?
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