What is an RSS Feed & How do I Find it?

Being asked for your website's RSS Feed is very common when you have content on the internet but, what is an RSS Feed, how do I find it and what do I do with it?

For those who love to read web content rather than publish it, if you subscribe to a feed for a particular website that content will be streamed directly to you in one concise format. And for those who create the web content, this enables worldwide syndication of your content by streaming it out to every reader who wants it!

What is an RSS Feed?

The RSS portion stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, an international web format used to instantly transfer web content from one location to another using a Feed, hence the term RSS Feed. The Feed portion transfers current web content across the internet making it accessible to anyone who subscribes to that feed or knows the feed address (URL).

For example; websites like cnn.com, youtube.com and blogs like mine ;) that offer constantly changing content can be accessed with one click in your feed reader. Such a time saver! You need't visit each of your favorite sites daily, just simply scan through topic titles and brief summaries in the reader and visit only if you find something of interest. A variety of RSS Readers are available such as Bloglines, Feedreader, My Yahoo, NewsGator or Google's feed reader.

How do I find your my RSS Feed or someone else's?...

Most every published webpage has syndicated the content with an RSS Feed. You can find the feed by first locating the RSS Feed symbol shown above (or a variation thereof like XML, RDF or Atom) and click on it. The web address (URL) that shows in the address bar within that new window, is the RSS Feed for that site.

My website can be accessed via babblicious.ca (web address) or it can be viewed with the RSS Feed http://babblicious.ca/?feed=rss2 or http://feeds.feedburner.com/babblicious (renamed as such via feedburner.com). If you are the owner/operator/webmaster of web content sites like FeedBurner enables tracking of feed statistics, customizing and monetizing.