Insights · 4 minutes
How to Follow a Site With RSS
RSS is the web's oldest, quietest subscription mechanism: no account, no algorithm, no inbox. What it is, how to pick a reader, and how to follow any site that offers a feed — this one included.
The subscription mechanism that predates the subscription economy
Before every site wanted your email address and every platform wanted to be the place you found things, the web solved "tell me when there's something new" with a small standard file. It's called an RSS feed — most sites that publish anything have one, whether or not they advertise it — and it lists the site's latest pieces in a format any feed reader can check.
The mechanics are almost embarrassingly simple. The site updates the file when it publishes. Your reader checks the file every so often. New items appear in your reader, in chronological order, under your control. That's the entire transaction: no account created, no list joined, no open-rate pixel, no recommendation engine deciding what you see. The site doesn't even know you're subscribed.
Why it's worth five minutes of setup
Email newsletters are fine — we run one — but every list you join is another party holding your address and another stream mixed into the place you do your work. Social platforms will surface a site's new piece only if their ranking decides to, which for the specialist publications worth following is approximately never.
A feed reader inverts all of that. It's one place where everything you've chosen to follow accumulates — the trade association's newsroom, the standards body's announcements, the two consultants whose judgment you trust, a government agency's press page — presented complete and in order. For anyone whose job involves keeping up with a sector, it is the closest thing to a professional reading instrument the web offers. And when you stop wanting a site's updates, you delete the feed and the relationship is over; there is no unsubscribe link to hunt for because there was never a list.
Picking a reader
A hosted reader lives at a website and follows you across devices: Feedly and Inoreader both have capable free tiers and are the common starting points. Feedbin is a small paid service with an unusually clean reading experience. If you'd rather own the whole arrangement, NetNewsWire is free and excellent on Mac and iPhone, and Thunderbird — which many offices already have installed for email — has had a feed reader built in for two decades.
There is no wrong choice, and switching later is painless: every reader imports and exports the same standard list of subscriptions, so your reading list is portable in a way no platform following list has ever been.
Subscribing to a site
In most readers you paste the site's ordinary address — the reader discovers the feed on its own. Failing that, look for an RSS link in the site's footer, or try the conventional locations: /feed/ on WordPress sites (which is to say, on most of the institutional web), or /rss.xml elsewhere. An orange icon of a dot with two arcs is the traditional signpost.
This blog's feed lives at lfw.com/blog/rss.xml. New articles appear there the moment they publish — the same pieces the email list gets, in the same full text, just delivered to an instrument you control instead of an inbox we had to earn our way into. Follow whichever way suits how you actually read; the point of publishing is that you see it, not how.