RSS feeds

RSS feeds have been around for more than 15 years, and they are a great way to automatically track content from blog posts and news sources. It has provided a standard way to for the content creator to allow their updates to be viewed by their audience. But while exploring ways to subscribe to feeds from my favorite websites, I learned that the process is still somewhat fragmented. The programming language may be the same, but when it comes to presentation, every website seems to have a different tactic.

The most obvious way to find an RSS feed on a website is to look for the standard RSS icon:

Any website that is using a feed will most likely have this displayed somewhere on their page. Usually this icon will be linked to the feed's URL, in which case you can simply click on it to find the actual feed, and copy and paste the URL if you want to add it to an aggregator. However, depending on the website, they may also try to use drop down menus to provide links directly to RSS readers. In which case, you must select a specific reader and then follow the websites prompts to subscribe. Still other sites have several different flavors of feeds, and in some cases block access to the full text versions unless you are a paid subscriber to their service. So while the purpose of RSS feeds remains constant, the application of this technology can still seem jarring to the end user.

Recently, Google discontinued its RSS aggregator called "Google Reader," but there are still many different aggregator applications available. But it makes one wonder that if Google decided to stop supporting this technology, will it still maintain a strong presence in future iterations of the web? If the fragmented nature of of my experience is any indication, than it may point to a waning of this web tool.