Easy RSS Tutorial.

On your phone you’ve got notifications, on your computer you have a different type of notifications and inside social media apps you have other independent notifications, right?

So what is RSS and why are notifications relevant?

Well on different services or devices you have separate notifications, on some occasions independent from each other. And that’s kind of a mess.

If you follow a number of blogs and some podcast on top of that it can get very stressful really quickly. To check if this guy has uploaded a new picture you have to check his Instagram, and then you have to switch apps to check if some other creator uploaded a YouTube video, switch again to see if your favorite podcaster has a new episode, switch to your email app to see if there’s a new blog from some other creator and now you have successfully opened 4 different apps just to keep up with the stuff you care about.

On top of that we must remind ourselves that each time you enter one social media app you are incentivized to stay on that app, but since you want to keep up with all platforms we don’t want to get sucked into this one app.

This method of keeping up bad for your attention, it reduces your focus, requires multiple actions and more space eon your phone or computer.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a really simple method for combining all feeds into one?

Well, that’s RSS: It stands for Really Simple Syndication.

How will it look like?

Instead of checking four or five news feeds, RSS is an app r program that reads all those feeds, copy pastes the content of all of them and presents them in one feed.

RSS is like a list of items, just like every news feed, but this one is the one to rule them all.

Inside the RSS news feed you can see text, images, videos and links.

But no comments, since RSS just copies what it finds on other apps instead of working with the other apps it just copy pastes what you tell it to and shows you what it found.

That sounds cool, how do I use it then?

There are two key parts: The App you download to combine the news feeds for you and RSS news feeds.

RSS apps are called news aggregators, they combine RSS news feeds. Your job is to tell your aggregator what news feeds to combine.

So go to your app store and find an RSS aggregator you like, I recommend you to read this Wikipedia article that lists popular aggregators.

Now to tell it what news feeds to combine you have to give it an RSS internet address.

Just like in e-mail you have your address (like my.name@gmail.com), RSS have a URL address, for example myblog.com/rss.

In e-mail you tell your computer who to email, in RSS you copy paste the RSS news feed address.

Each news aggregator app has different ways to add a new news feed link, but generally there’s a big plus sign that does the job.

once you are adding a news feed, copy paste the news feed address of the blog, podcast, website or internet creator you want to keep up with.

How do I find out the news feed address of my favorite website or creator?

Websites often have an RSS button, if you click it it will take you to the news feed address you need to copy paste to add it to your aggregator.

The RSS button looks like this, you may have seen it before not knowing what it was, well now you know :)

A creator I want to keep up with has no RSS icon on their website, what can I do?

Social media sites like YouTube, Twitter and Instagram don’t publicly display their RSS tools.

But that docent mean they don’t use RSS in the background to work out their news feeds without telling you.

I wont go into detail on how to get the RSS address from every platform, but here I have linked you to some useful tutorials and services that find out the RSS address for you:

• How to get YouTube channels working with RSS.
• How to subscribe to subreddits with RSS.
• Follow an Instagram account with RSS with this tool.
• Follow a twitter user with RSS with one of this 2 options (option 1, option 2).

In a nutshell.

Now you should understand how to combine your news feeds with RSS, you understand the 2 main parts of an RSS setup: your aggregator or app you need to download & that RSS news feed address look like website addresses and you just need to copy paste them into your aggregator.

Keep your feeds organized and enjoy a more calm and stress free news feed with the added benefit of having everything in one place.