RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a web feed, that allows users to subscribe to specific websites and receive updates when something new gets published. It is a form of curated feed, where the end user controls which feeds to subscribe to. This is in contrast to algorithmic feeds used in many social media platforms that do not let the end user control (to a large extent) the type of content they get to see. Algorithmic feeds are intentionally hostile towards the user in order to increase engagement, revenue, or both.

I am personally in favor of curated feeds. They are an example of software working for the user and not against. Thus, I have added a feed to this website, which is hopefully how you found this article.

For this site I am using Atom—a newer and slightly more complete specification than RSS. Some might have noticed that when clicking on the RSS section in the header, it brings you to a page that looks just as nice as the rest of my site. This is not always the case when visiting someone’s web feed. Feeds are written in XML which is a markup language that isn’t very nice to read. Here is an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="atom.xsl"?>

<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title>Lander's Feed</title>
  <link href="http://landerwells.com/atom.xml" rel="self"/>
  <link href="http://landerwells.com/"/>
  <id>http://.com/</id>
  <updated>2026-07-25T00:00:00Z</updated>

  <entry>
    <title>Adding RSS to this site!</title>
    <link href="http://landerwells.com/atom"/>
    <id>http://landerwells.com/atom</id>
    <updated>2026-07-25T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <summary>
      I have added a feed back to the site after the transition to Org-mode
      publishing from Hugo.
    </summary>
    <author>
      <name>Lander Wells</name>
    </author>
  </entry>
</feed>

This is my exact feed at the moment, and it much less readable than the current page you get dropped into. XML allows configuration via XSL, which is how I was able to achieve a better looking feed! I first discovered this was possible from this feed. I marveled at this solution because not only is RSS an obscure name for those who don’t already know what it is, but clicking on an RSS link usually brings you to a cryptic and poorly rendered page. It was for these reasons that I wanted to put some extra care into how my feed displayed.