How To Use Rss Feed

A while dorsum, I was scrolling through Twitter and came across this postal service:

I was dislocated—RSS hasn't disappeared. I apply it every single day. It's an integral office of my workflow that helps me stay up to appointment with news, come up upwardly with new ideas for content, assemble sources to cite in my posts, and keep my inbox clean. But the 300+ likes on this post and a subsequent Twitter search for "bring back RSS" that resulted in dozens of Tweets showed me that RSS is underutilized.

If yous think RSS died when Google Reader close down—or if yous're unaware, or only vaguely aware, of how to use RSS feeds—this guide is for you.

• What is RSS?

• How to utilize RSS feeds

• Keep track of blog posts, YouTube channels, and podcasts

• Receive email newsletters in your RSS reader

• View social media accounts from an RSS feed

• Discover newly-posted jobs

• Create email newsletters automatically

• Create social media posts automatically

• Monitor brand mentions

• Do something with what you've read

What is RSS?

An RSS (Really Unproblematic Syndication) feed is an online file that contains details near every piece of content a site has published. Each time a site publishes a new piece of content, details virtually that content—including the full-text of the content or a summary, publication appointment, writer, link, etc.—are automatically generated in the file and displayed in reverse chronological club.

Make your business organization more efficient with Zapier

Since it'southward updated with details about every piece of content a site publishes, you tin utilize RSS feeds for things like keeping up to date with every new commodity your favorite blog publishes or automatically generating email newsletters or social media posts to promote your new content.

RSS feeds are typically coded in XML format and expect like this:

If you're used to looking at code all day, you might be able to brand sense of this every bit easily as yous can read formatted content on a website. But for the rest of us, this looks similar a lot of nonsense. So to turn an RSS feed into something readable, yous need an RSS reader.

An RSS reader is an app that parses the XML code of an RSS feed and renders it to look more like what you'd come across on a website. For example, here's the same RSS feed pictured above in Feedly (costless plan available), a popular RSS reader:

Ten years ago, when RSS was more popular, well-nigh every website had an RSS icon that linked to its RSS feed, making it easy for people to subscribe via their preferred reader. Today, that's rarely the instance, but the absence of an RSS icon on a site doesn't hateful you lot can't get that site's content via RSS: Read our tutorial on how to find the RSS feed for almost any website for more details. With the right RSS reader app, you tin can get an RSS feed from but about any blog, podcast, social media account, or email newsletter you lot want to follow.

But RSS works the other way around, as well. Information technology doesn't only pull content into an RSS reader; you tin can employ it to push content to sites and apps as well.

I use Feedly every bit my RSS reader—so I'll employ that in nigh of the examples below—merely there are enough of other great RSS reader apps to consider if you're getting started with RSS. Or if you want to movement forwards with Feedly, check out our tutorial on how to add together an RSS feed to Feedly.

How to apply RSS feeds

Post-obit your favorite blogs is the simplest way to go started with RSS, but it's only one of the many benefits RSS offers. Here are eight ways to utilise RSS feeds to consolidate the information yous intendance about and automate your work.

You'll need a Zapier business relationship to use the workflows in this piece. If you lot don't have an business relationship yet, information technology'sfree to get started.

Keep track of new weblog posts, podcasts, and YouTube aqueduct uploads

I read a lot of blogs. Every bit a writer, staying upwardly to appointment on what blogs—in both the industry I work in and those I write about—are publishing is a keen way to larn new things, come upwardly with new ideas for topics to write about, and detect studies that are worth linking to in the posts I write.

Subscribing to the blogs I follow in an RSS reader delivers each of those benefits. Rather than having to visit each publication's blog individually to run across if new content has been published, I see all of the new content from all of the blogs I'm interested in within a single interface in Feedly.

When I log in to Feedly, I see a list of all of the sites I follow that accept published new content since the last fourth dimension I reviewed each feed, along with a count of the number of pieces of new content that take been published since my last review.

I can click any feed to run into the content I haven't reviewed, click through and read any specific piece of content I'm interested in, and and so click a Mark All Every bit Read button to clear all of the new articles from Feedly and then that the next time I log in, I merely see content I oasis't viewed before.

But y'all can use RSS for more than following blogs. You can also use it to see new podcast episodes and new videos posted to your favorite YouTube channels—all from within your RSS reader.

A lot of times, subscribing to an RSS feed for any type of content is as unproblematic as pasting the URL of the page (a weblog homepage, podcast episodes list, YouTube channel homepage, etc.) that you want to follow into your RSS reader. If an RSS feed exists for that page, you tin can subscribe to it immediately.

You can also apply Zapier to create custom RSS feeds so yous can collect all your reading material in i identify. Hither are a few things to attempt:

But if no RSS feed exists, you're not necessarily out of luck. Instead, yous can use RSS.app (free) to create an RSS feed for that page that you tin can then follow in your RSS reader. (Y'all can also check out our guide to finding RSS feeds for almost any site.)

Either pasting the URL in an RSS reader or using RSS.app mostly works, but occasionally, y'all may run across a site that won't cooperate. In that case, at that place'due south another pick: You can subscribe to the publisher'southward newsletter via RSS using the instructions beneath.

Receive and view email newsletters in your RSS reader

The jury may still be out on whether inbox cypher is good or bad for productivity, simply for me, information technology's the only way to manage email. And because I'g an inbox zip fanatic, I unsubscribe immediately from every email newsletter I receive. I tin't stand to have an email newsletter bottleneck up my inbox and harassing me until I have time to look at it.

Only there are some newsletters I want to read because the publishers simply evangelize new content via those newsletters. In that location's no corresponding blog post, podcast, or YouTube channel to follow in Feedly; the simply way to get the content is to subscribe to the newsletter.

The solution to this issue: Impale the Newsletter (gratuitous).

Kill the Newsletter generates an electronic mail address that you can use to subscribe to newsletters you lot want to receive. Any newsletters that are sent to that email address are converted into an XML feed. To see those newsletters, only add the provided feed link to your RSS reader.

After that, you'll be able to view the newsletters you want to read alongside the other content yous follow in your RSS reader, and you lot don't have to worry about newsletters bottleneck up your email inbox.

View social media posts from important accounts

If you're tired of just seeing the posts social media algorithms recollect yous want to meet and, instead, desire to run into everything that a company/person posts, you can create an RSS feed for that account in RSS.app and so subscribe to it in your RSS reader.

For example, if I desire to run across Zapier's Twitter updates in Feedly, I tin paste the URL of Zapier's Twitter folio into RSS.app, generate an RSS feed and URL, and subscribe to that URL in Feedly to see all of Zapier'due south Twitter updates alongside the other sources I follow.

You tin make as many feeds as you want using this method, but they'll only work for 1 business relationship at a fourth dimension.

Another selection is to create a more advanced social media RSS feed using Zapier. For case, by pairing Twitter with RSS by Zapier, you tin can create an RSS feed that displays all of the Tweets from a listing you've created on Twitter.

Here are a few more examples of pre-congenital social media + RSS by Zapier integrations you tin can employ:

Notice newly posted job openings

Some employers post their open roles on Glassdoor, some post on Indeed, some use niche sites, and some only mail jobs to their websites. This makes looking for a new job a long process of navigating to multiple websites to look for new postings yous might want to apply to.

RSS makes this easier as well.

Some chore search sites, similar We Piece of work Remotely, offer RSS feeds for each of their categories of jobs that you can subscribe to for updates.

Others, similar Indeed and Glassdoor, let you subscribe to chore alerts via email—only you don't necessarily have to use your personal email address. Instead, sign up for alerts using a Kill the Newsletter e-mail address to get those e-mail alerts in your RSS reader.

Yous can frequently subscribe to many websites' career pages, too, by pasting the URL of the page into your RSS reader or using RSS.app to create a feed.

Y'all can create a feed for each of the sources you look at often to meet new jobs that have been posted in your RSS reader. Or, if you want all new jobs in a single feed, you lot can create an RSS superfeed using Zapier that combines multiple feeds together and delivers new chore posts to y'all in one big feed.

Take this even farther with our tutorial on how to automatically track job listings from multiple sources, similar email, social media, team chat apps, and website.

Create email newsletters automatically

RSS is a great way to continue track of the content your favorite publishers are posting, only information technology likewise works well from the other side of the contend, too. If you're a publisher, you can use an RSS feed for your blog, podcast, YouTube channel, social media profile, etc. to build your e-mail newsletters automatically.

For example, if your email newsletter is a list of your near recently published posts with titles, links, and brief descriptions, you can push button those details via RSS to your email newsletter tool and so you don't have to copy and paste those details in manually. Then, you go in, add a subject line, select a list, and click Ship to streamline your newsletter creation procedure.

Many email newsletter apps—including MailerLite and Mailchimp—offering RSS-to-email features past default. But even if your preferred e-mail newsletter app doesn't offer this feature, y'all tin build a Zap (automated workflow by Zapier) that connects your e-mail tool to RSS by Zapier to automate the process.

Here'southward an example Zap for SendGrid:

Create social media posts automatically

Another way publishers can automate some of their work is by using RSS feed updates to automatically post new content to their social media profiles.

With RSS by Zapier, you can connect your RSS feed to your social media profiles to automatically publish posts for your new content on your business or personal social media profiles:

Maybe you frequently share manufacture articles with your coworkers or manage a social media account where y'all want to share interesting content from elsewhere. Try these workflows, which will automatically share what you're reading without needing to re-create and paste.

Add together a assimilate step—available on our paid plans—to create and send out a digest of your favorite articles at a predetermined time.

Monitor brand mentions in a feed

You could pay a monthly subscription fee for a brand monitoring tool to track mentions of your brand across the spider web, or you tin practise the same thing using RSS feeds and a reader for free.

If you lot have Google Alerts gear up for your name/your brand's proper noun, you tin have those alerts delivered to an RSS feed instead of your electronic mail account. When setting upwardly your alert, select RSS feed in the Evangelize to field. Once the warning is gear up, you lot can grab the link you demand to subscribe to the feed in your RSS reader.

And then, you can use Zapier to monitor brand mentions on several social media sites:

If yous want a unmarried source where you can come across everything your competitors are doing, an RSS reader is a great selection.

Using the methods described higher up, you can subscribe to your competitors' blogs and electronic mail newsletters, meet all of their social media posts, and even get Google Alerts for online mentions of their brands—and see each of these pieces of information inside of your RSS reader.

Exercise something with what y'all've read

Sometimes we read for pleasure, and other times we selection upwards useful insights we may want to try after, like a new recipe or a productivity tip suggested in an article. Try these Zaps to turn those updates into tasks to accomplish later on.

New to Zapier? It's a tool that helps anyone connect apps and automate workflows—without any complicated code.Sign upwardly for free .

The benefit of using RSS feeds

RSS started to fall out of favor as social media became more common. Only following brands and authors on social media isn't the best way to go on up with their new content. For one, some brands post every fifteen minutes of every solar day with links to new and former content akin. There's no guarantee that you'll happen to notice new content in your feed amid all of the clutter.

Second, social media sites rarely show you everything posted past the accounts you lot follow. Instead, they use algorithms that decide what you lot want to see and surface that content offset. If what you want to meet is everything, you're usually out of luck.

RSS feeds, on the other hand, evangelize all of the content the sites you follow take published—all in reverse chronological order. There'south no algorithm deciding what you do/don't desire to see, there'south no old content thrown into the list, and at that place are no repeats of content.

If y'all mostly want to meet content lots of people liked or interacted with, social media is the way to get. Merely if what you want to encounter is all of the most recent content from the sites and people you care most, RSS beats social media every fourth dimension.

This article was originally published in June 2019. It was updated in Jan 2021 by Zapier staff writer Krystina Martinez.

Get productivity tips delivered straight to your inbox

We'll electronic mail you ane-3 times per week—and never share your data.

How To Use Rss Feed,

Source: https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-use-rss-feeds/

Posted by: mcnealaune1955.blogspot.com

Share this post