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RSS

What is RSS?

RSS originally stood for RDF Site Summary, RDF stands for Resource Description Framework, a W3C standard format that was used in early versions of RSS, but after RSS stopped using the RDF format it was called Rich Site Summary, and then later on was changed again to Really Simply Syndication.
Syndication is the practice of making something available to be used by external parties, in the context of the web this means creating a feed of content that can be accessed by others, and RSS provides a standardised format for this to be done with. RSS is not the only standardised format of web syndication, another notable format is Atom, and the standards between the different RSS versions varies quite a bit, but RSS v2.0 is intended to be frozen, and has not changed in the last 14 years.

Finiding RSS Feeds

There are a lot more RSS feeds out there than you'd expect. Lots of sites have RSS feeds if you look, for example you can get an RSS feed of a subreddit by adding .rss to the end of the url for that subreddit (this also works for multireddits), you can get an RSS feed for a tumblr blog if they have the custom theme enabled with username.tumblr.com/rss, and lots of other sites have their own feeds too. My feed is located here and I also plan to have a directory of other people's RSS feeds linked here at some point!!

Using RSS Feeds

There are lots of softwares out there that act as RSS feed readers, I personally use RSS Guard which has Windows, Linux, and Mac versions available and also works with ATOM and JSON feeds as well as a variety of feed services.
Once you have an RSS feed reader, then it's just a matter of getting the URL of the feeds you want to subscribe to and putting those into your reader.

Making your own RSS Feed

RSS feeds are contianed within an .rss or .xml file, and follow the XML file format. A barebones example of the code you'd have included in your file, with two items listed, is below. 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">

<channel>
<title>Title of RSS Feed</title>
<link>Site Link</link>
<description>Description</description>
<item>
    <title>Item Title</title>
    <link>item link</link>
    <description>item description</description>
</item>
<item>
    <title>Item Title</title>
    <link>Item link</link>
    <description>item description</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
You can manage an RSS feed's file entirely manually and do updates by copy pasting the chunk of code for each new item you want to add to your feed. However there are also tools that exist to help you write and manage your RSS feed and its items much easier, and these will also let you more easily add other data to your items, such as timestamps, that you could do manually as well but can be a bit of a hassle to get right.

So far the easiest to use RSS generation tool I've found has been Super Simple RSS which is a portable tool and is great for beginners just starting with an RSS feed. Other more complex tools do exist out there but ssRSS is good enough for what I want.

Making your RSS feed available to others

Once you have a .rss or .xml file with your RSS feed written to it, you just have to upload it as a file to wherever you want to host it. Then it's just a matter of sharing the URL to that file and other people should be able to use it to add your RSS feed to their RSS readers. When you want to put something new on your RSS feed, or change or remove something old, it's just a matter of overwriting the file in the same location with the updated file.

Displaying your RSS feed on your site

Well now you have an RSS feed you might want to display it on your site!
Previously I recommended a third party website for parsing your RSS feed to HTML, however that website has since stopped working and generally it's not always the greatest idea to rely on other online services to stay up. Luckily about a week before the site stopped working I had noticed it being slow to work and decided to write a standalone script that did the same thing. You can find the script here and save the file to your own site to use it. The usage of the script is explained in the comments of the file itself!