RSS feed readers let you subscribe to feeds, then sort and organize them. They might open as just a bunch of complex text but use an RSS feed reader to access them and you can do a lot. RSS feeds exist as files on most web sites. Why are RSS feeds important to us though? They are very effective ways to retrieving latest updates from our favourite web sites, so we don’t need to visit them. In fact, this very site supports RSS feeds like any other popular one. The truth is that RSS is very much alive.

It shut shop many years ago, and that might give one the impression that RSS feeds are dead. You may have used Google Reader in the past too, and that was a very popular web-based RSS feed reader. Firefox for example, had something called Live Bookmarks. The RSS logo is rarely seen on web browsers and it’s true, several browsers don’t let you access RSS feeds right off the browser. There have some ramblings about how RSS is long gone, of late. You could access it to know the last updated pages of a web site, something particularly useful when visiting news web sites. RSS feeds were a constantly updated index of the articles of a web site by recency.

Most web browsers even displayed an orange logo that denoted the web site you were visiting supported RSS. You may have heard of RSS feeds at some point in the past.

Web feed reader