How to Follow a Site With RSS

What RSS is

Long before every site asked for your email address, the web had a simple way to say "tell me when there's something new." It's a small standard file called an RSS feed, and it lists a site's latest articles in a format any feed reader can check. Most sites that publish anything have one, even if they don't advertise it.

It works like this. The site updates the file when it publishes. Your reader checks the file every so often. New items show up in your reader in the order they were published.

You don't create an account or join a list. There's no tracking pixel counting whether you opened anything, and 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, but every list you join means one more organization holding your address and more mail landing in the inbox you work from. Social platforms show you a site's new article only if their ranking decides to, and for the specialist publications worth following, that rarely happens.

A feed reader gives you one place for everything you've chosen to follow, complete and in order: the trade association's newsroom, the standards body's announcements, the two consultants whose judgment you trust, a government agency's press page.

If your job involves keeping up with a sector, it's the closest thing the web has to a professional reading tool. And when you no longer want a site's updates, you delete the feed. There's no unsubscribe link to hunt for, because you never joined a list.

Picking a reader

A hosted reader runs as a website, so it works across all your devices. Feedly and Inoreader both have capable free tiers and are where most people start. Feedbin is a small paid service with an unusually clean reading experience.

If you'd rather keep everything on your own computer, NetNewsWire is free and excellent on Mac and iPhone. 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 easy. Every reader imports and exports the same standard list of subscriptions, so your reading list comes with you.

Subscribing to a site

In most readers you just paste in the site's regular address, and the reader finds the feed on its own. If it doesn't, look for an RSS link in the site's footer, or try the usual locations: /feed/ on sites built on WordPress, which covers most organization websites, or /rss.xml elsewhere. The traditional RSS icon is orange, with a dot and two curved lines.

This blog's feed is at LFW.com/blog/rss.xml. New articles show up there as soon as they're published, with the same full text our email list gets. Follow along whichever way suits how you actually read. What matters to us is that you see it.