1. What is RSS and how does it work
2. RSS Clients
3. How do you use a client
4. Atom

RSS is a standard format to let a client access updates from a website. The standard is xml based, feeds files (usually ending with .rss or .xml) have at least a title, a link and a description, and zero or more feed items. The way this works is that a server would host the .rss or .xml file on some url, then the client would fetch the xml file and parse it locally: if the client did not have any of the fetched feed items locally, It will notify the user that a new item has been updated and It will update It's local copy.

In other words, the client would compare the newly fetched feed file and a previous local version (if it had one), then if the fetched file has more items this means that a new item was published. The way this notification is presented depends on the client you are using, as well as the frequency of fetching the updates which you can usually change.

There are a large number of free and open source clients out there, you may try some and see If you like any of them or just write your own since It is very simple. For emacs, you could use Gnus, Elfeed or NewsTicker (which comes by default in emacs since emacs 22) or any other. I tried all three of them and they are great, I like NewsTicker interface but gnus is more powerful so I use gnus on my daily workflow.

There are many alternatives outside of emacs, both GUI and tui such as tiny tiny RSS. A quick search online would help you find the most suitable one for your liking.

The usage is usually quite straightforward: you add the url of the feed to your client and you update the feeds when you want to check for new publications. The client will query all the urls of the feeds you set up and show you the results.

I really like the simplicity of RSS. An alternative you may find online are Atom feeds which were created to address some of the limitation of RSS by being more extensible and flexible, but It works exactly the same for the most part so you can apply what you learned about RSS to Atom. Usually clients can read both.

Travel: Feeds, Index