Hi, I have a RSS feed. This allows you to subscribe to my words without me even knowing. How does it work? Well you need an RSS link, here’s mine:
https://brandonrozek.com/blog/index.xml
Then you need to input this URL into a newsreader application (Feedly, Feedbin, NetNewsWire, many others) which checks to see if there are any changes in the XML file and presents it in a visually nice way.
In fact, many websites come with a RSS feed. You don’t even need to know the exact URL for it to work, if you type in https://brandonrozek.com into your newsreader, you’ll get options for my various different feeds.
How does that work? Well the website creator needs to include a tag in their website HTML.
<link rel="alternate"
type="application/rss+xml"
href="https://brandonrozek.com/blog/index.xml"
title="Brandon Rozek's Blog" />
Most RSS feeds don’t come styled. Therefore if you click on the RSS link you’ll see a bunch of XML formatted text. That can be confusing for people when they first visit, can we do better?
About Feeds RSS Style
Matt Webb created https://aboutfeeds.com in order to provide a friendly overview into the world of RSS. As part of that he includes a style called pretty-feed.xsl. The file comes with instructions built in, but it’s mostly as simple as adding a style tag in the beginning of the XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="https://brandonrozek.com/PATH-TO-YOUR-STYLES/pretty-feed-v3.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>
I hope more bloggers incorporate the style into their feed. I’m waiting for the day that the largest blogging platform Wordpress includes it by default.
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