I am a long-time proponent of RSS but am aware that it is declining in visibility. Many sites large and small are not offering RSS feeds any more. What’s up?
First, for those not familiar with RSS, it is a way to subscribe to latest update feeds from websites. You find RSS (or Atom) data feeds wherever you see the little orange feed icon pictured (or similar). Pop the feed URL in your reader and you automatically get fed new headlines and meta data (author, date, subject, summary and maybe full text), with links to the original articles.
Time was when RSS feed reading was supported by many dedicated feed readers, some email clients and most browsers. And major sites like Facebook and Twitter offered RSS feeds as an alternative way of subscribing to updates.
No more. Widely used readers such as FeedDemon and Google Reader have been discontinued, citing declining popularity, though services such as Feedly (recommended) continue. Amongst browsers, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer include RSS support, but Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge do not. Apple removed RSS support in the Mountain Lion versions of Mail and Safari, although features were partially restored in Safari 8.
In an excellent article for the Sydney Morning Herald, Adam Turner explains why:
In this age of format wars, corporate takeovers, legal battles and patent trolling, RSS is one of few great standards we can all rely on. Which could be exactly why the control freaks of the internet want to kill it. …
Over the last 12 months both Facebook and Twitter have quietly removed RSS links from their webpages, eliminating an easy way to receive notifications without the need to interact with the services directly. Meanwhile Google+ has never offered RSS feeds. Of course it’s clear that these social media services have an interest in killing off RSS. They all want to usurp its role as the web’s universal subscription platform and become the de facto gatekeepers of the web.
Yes it’s true that these services can take the place of RSS in many circumstances, but it comes at a price. The great thing about RSS is that no-one controls it — you can’t buy it, block it or ban it. It adheres to one of the web’s founding principles; “information wants to be free”. Meanwhile Twitter, Facebook and Google’s founding principles are closer to; “information needs to be monetised”. Once these gatekeepers control what you see, and monitor how you interact with it, it’s easier to target advertising at you.
So it’s not that RSS isn’t great (it is quite possibly the best thing since sliced bread); it’s that the big guys don’t want you to use it.
But look around and you’ll find that those that care primarily for your information needs rather than your £££ offer RSS feeds in abundance. Legislation.gov.uk, BAILII and GOV.UK all offer RSS feeds for every conceivable view of their update data. For the detailed how to, see below.
All blog software and most other content management systems offer RSS feeds by default (like WordPress). If your blog or site does not offer feeds, or they are not working properly or are not promoted, why not? Ask your systems admin. Fix it!
Finally, even if this all sounds a bit technical or you don’t want to be bothered subscribing to feeds, consider that most third party sites that offer latest headlines etc do so by reading RSS feeds, either directly or indirectly, for example using an app like dlvr.it to plug RSS feeds into social media accounts. It’s ironic that Twitter who for selfish reasons discontinued support for RSS, actually publishes millions of tweets a minute that are generated from RSS feeds.
So next time someone tells you RSS is dying, dead even, give them the alternative facts. And happy feed reading!
Who needs RSS?
RSS does not matter to the average end-user who really doesn’t need to know about it. But it matters to the “information manager”. That may be you as an individual wanting to curate your own information update flow; it may be you as a blogger wanting to share some of that flow with your audience; it may be you as a professional information manager tasked with curating the flow for your organisation; it may be you as a commercial publisher wishing to leverage the flow and add value.
Finding feeds
Always first look for the RSS feed icon on the page whose latest content you want to monitor. It may not be white out of orange as shown; it’s the 
broadcast symbol that is the key.
Some sites may refer to “Atom” feeds. Atom is a particular flavour of RSS, functioning in the same way.
Feed URL syntax
Can’t find a feed? Chances are you can guess it for principal update pages. To the page URL append one of the following to create the default posts feed URL for the most popular blog/website platforms:
/feed (WordPress sites – the majority); or
/feeds/posts/default (Blogger sites).
For example, the online infolaw Newsletter feed is at www.infolaw.co.uk/newsletter/feed
As well as subscribing to site feeds, you can also usually subscribe to feeds for particular categories or tags and to search results. Here are a couple of examples from the Newsletter site reflecting standard WordPress syntax for category and search results:
www.infolaw.co.uk/newsletter/category/blogging/feed
www.infolaw.co.uk/newsletter/search/copyright/feed
Government feeds
The new GOV.UK site provides Atom feeds for every conceivable category of new content: news by Department, by (Worldwide) Country and by Topic, and new documents for Policies, Publications and Announcements, filtered by department, subject and more. Just visit the desired page and look out for the “ atom” link. For departments, countries and topics you can get the relevant feed by simply adding .atom to the end of the page URL. For example www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-education.atom
Custom law alerts
It’s as easy for a site to provide an RSS feed of dynamic search results as it is to produce the equivalent web results page. Such feeds are a very effective way to pull custom alerts on specific topics.
BAILII implements just that. Do a BAILII search for the term you want to monitor (for example aircraft noise) and then get the feed from the top of the page where you see “
RSS feed for this search”.
Now go to legislation.gov.uk and you can do similar for legislation there. There is no handy feed link provided, but take an advanced search URL and in front of the ? insert /data.feed and at the end append &sort=published. For example http://www.legislation.gov.uk/all/data.feed?text=”Civil Aviation Act 2012″&sort=published
The author
Nick Holmes is Editor of the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers and the Internet for Lawyers CPD service.
Excercise
If you already use RSS, try some of the custom BAILII and legislation feeds illustrated. If you are new to RSS, find out if your browser supports RSS bookmarks/favorites. Try adding the specific infolaw examples given on this page. Visit Feedly and review its features.