Guides · Feeds

What RSS is, and how to follow the news without an algorithm

Updated 12 October 2026 · 7 min read

Most of the news people read today reaches them through a feed someone else arranges: a social network, a news app, a search engine's "for you" page. Those feeds are ranked to keep you scrolling. RSS is an older, plainer idea that still works well: you choose the sites, and their new articles arrive in one list, newest first, with nothing reordered or left out.

This guide explains what a feed is, how to find one, and how to build a reading habit that does not take over your day.

What a feed is, in plain words

A feed is a small file that a website keeps up to date alongside its normal pages. Instead of the full page design, it holds a simple list of the site's latest items: for each one, a title, a link, a date and usually a short summary or the full text. The file lives at its own address, such as https://example.com/feed.

You do not read that file yourself. A feed reader (also called an RSS reader or aggregator) does it for you. You give the reader the addresses of the feeds you want; it checks them regularly, collects anything new, and shows it all in one place. When you have read an item it is marked as read, so next time you only see what is new.

The site cannot change the order of what you see, and if you stop wanting its articles, you remove the feed and they stop arriving.

RSS and Atom, briefly

"RSS" is used loosely for all feeds, but there are two main formats. Both are XML, and any decent reader handles both.

• RSS began at Netscape, which published RSS 0.90 in March 1999. The version most sites use today is RSS 2.0, first published in 2002; its specification, now maintained by the RSS Advisory Board, expands the name as "Really Simple Syndication". A separate branch, RSS 1.0, is based on RDF and is still found on some older sites.
• Atom was designed later to tidy up some loose ends in RSS, such as how dates and content types are written. It was published as an internet standard, RFC 4287, in December 2005. Every Atom entry must carry an identifier, a title and an "updated" date.

As a reader, "has an RSS feed" and "has an Atom feed" mean the same thing: you can follow it.

Why it still matters

• It is chronological. Items appear in the order they were published. A blog that posts once a month is not buried under a busy news site.
• You choose the sources. There are no suggested accounts and no "because you read" items. What you see is exactly what you subscribed to.
• It has an end. Once you have read the new items, you are done. There is no endless scroll refilling itself.
• It does not depend on a platform. Feeds are an open format. If your reader closes or you simply want to move, you can take your list of subscriptions with you (see OPML explained).

How to find a site's feed

Many sites still publish a feed but no longer advertise it. Try these in order.

1. Look for a link or icon

Check the footer, the sidebar and any "Follow us" area for a link labelled RSS, Atom, Feed or Subscribe, or for the orange square icon with a dot and two curved lines. Large news sites often have an "RSS feeds" page with one feed per section.

2. Try the usual addresses

Many publishing systems put the feed at a predictable address. Add one of these to the end of the site's address and see whether you get a page of XML or a download instead of an error:

• /feed (common on WordPress sites)
• /rss or /rss.xml
• /atom.xml or /index.xml

3. Look in the page source

Sites can declare their feed invisibly in the page's code. In most desktop browsers, right-click the page and choose "View page source", then search (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) for rss+xml or atom+xml. You are looking for a line like this, as described in MDN's reference for the rel attribute:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
      title="Example News" href="https://example.com/feed">

The href value is the feed's address.

4. Let the reader find it

Most feed readers can do the steps above for you: you type the site's address and the reader looks for feeds. In TheyreMine you can type just a site name such as bbc.co.uk and click Find feeds. It checks the address itself, then the feeds the site declares in its pages, then common addresses such as /feed, and finally any news sitemap the site lists for search engines, which helps with news sites that have dropped RSS. Each result shows its type, how many items it holds and the date of its newest item, so you can spot a feed the site has abandoned before you subscribe. The steps are in Subscribing to a feed.

What to subscribe to

Feeds work best for sources that publish regularly but not constantly. Good candidates:

• Individual writers and small blogs who post occasionally. These are the easiest things to miss elsewhere, and the most rewarding to follow by feed.
• One or two sections of a big news site rather than its front page. A "top stories" feed from a major outlet can publish dozens of items a day.
• Local sources: your council, a local paper, a club or community group.
• Practical updates: release notes for software you use, a supplier's announcements, an organisation's press releases, job listings in your field.

Start small. Ten well-chosen feeds you actually read are worth more than a hundred you mark as read in bulk.

Avoiding overload

A feed reader shows everything, which is the point, but it also means you control the volume. A few habits help:

• Group feeds by how you read them, not just by subject. A "Daily" group for things you check every morning and a "Weekly" group for longer reads keeps the urgent apart from the interesting. In TheyreMine these are colour-coded categories; see Organising feeds.
• Set a routine. Open the reader once or twice a day at a fixed time instead of whenever a number appears.
• Skim titles first. Read the list of headlines, open only what interests you, and mark the rest read without guilt.
• Prune regularly. Every month or two, unsubscribe from feeds you always skip, and from feeds that have stopped publishing. TheyreMine labels a feed quiet after 7 days without new items, stale after 30 days, and failing when its last three checks have failed (see Feed health badges), which makes the dead ones easy to spot.
• Save what you want to keep. Readers usually delete old items after a while. TheyreMine keeps items for 30 days; if an article matters, save it as a bookmark.

The limits of feeds

RSS is not a way round a publisher's choices, and it helps to know where it falls short:

• Summary-only feeds. Many sites put only a headline and a sentence or two in the feed, so that you visit the site to read the rest. The feed still tells you what is new; you click through for the article.
• Paywalls. A subscription site's feed will usually list all its articles, but opening one takes you to the same paywall as anyone else. A feed does not give access to paid content.
• Missing feeds. Some sites, and most social networks, no longer offer feeds at all. News sitemaps cover some news sites; for others there may be no feed to follow.
• Abandoned feeds. Sites sometimes redesign and leave the old feed in place, frozen on the same articles for years. Check the date of the newest item when you subscribe.
• Delay. Readers check feeds on a schedule (TheyreMine checks every 30 minutes by default), so a feed is not an instant alert service.

Within those limits, a feed reader is one of the simplest ways to follow the sites you trust, in the order they publish, on your own schedule. If you want to try one, the feed reader section of the help walks through TheyreMine's, and you can browse demo feeds without creating an account.