People on the internet write a lot of stuff. How do you keep up with it… securely?

I don’t want to be creating an account or share my email address to whichever site I visit.

Enter RSS

Short for Really Simple Syndication, it is a specification to share your blog or podcast or whatever so that others can subscribe to it anonymously. The subscribers will be updated whenever a new article is published without the publisher (the blog writer, or podcast creator) having to store and spam everyone’s inboxes.

How does it work?

It really does live up to its name. Along with your website, you publish an XML document that contains the metadata about your website. This document is typically hosted at site-name/feed.xml.

For example, consider the below XML for a blog named The Coffee Blog.

<rss>
  <channel>
    <title>The Coffee Blog</title>
    <link>https://thecoffeeblog.com</link>
    <description>All about coffee</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <item>
      <title>How to brew coffee</title>
      <link>https://thecoffeeblog.com/how-to-brew-coffee</link>
      <description>Learn how to brew the perfect cup of coffee.</description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Jun 2025 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">12345</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Best coffee beans</title>
      <link>https://thecoffeeblog.com/best-coffee-beans</link>
      <description>Discover the best coffee beans for your taste.</description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 11 Jun 2025 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">12346</guid>

    <!-- More items can be added here as and when new blog posts are ready-->
  </channel>
</rss>

There is bunch of metadata about the website itself followed by a list of <item> elements. Each <item> represents a blog post or an article. The <title>, <link>, <description>, <pubDate>, and <guid> elements provide information about the article.

The subscribers can now use a software that downloads this file periodically (lets say every 5 minutes) and checks for new <item> elements. If there are new items, it can notify the user about the new articles. Note how there is a <link> element in each <item>. This is a convenient way for the subscriber to discover new content once it is available.

You are the Subscriber. The software that does this download-and-compare operation is called a RSS Reader. The document is called an RSS Feed and the process of sharing articles this way is called Syndication. The blog poster only updates this file everytime a new post is created. All subscribers eventually get notified about the new post.

Some popular RSS readers are Feedly, Inoreader, and The Old Reader. These are paid services that allow you to subscribe to multiple RSS feeds and read them in one place. There are also free and open-source alternatives like Tiny Tiny RSS that you can self-host.

If you know how to program, you can write your own RSS reader, it is not that hard.