Sharing Drupal Content with RSS

By Lynn Beighley and Seamus Bellamy from Drupal For Dummies, 2nd Edition

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a specific format for content that can be read by web applications. Your Drupal site can access content in an RSS format which is provided by websites with frequently updated content (such as news).

If your browser understands how to interpret RSS-formatted content, and most modern browsers do, you can preview RSS feeds by browsing to them. These feeds use web addresses, so you can paste them into your browser to preview them. For example, you can see a feed by browsing to Drupal.org/node/feed. This is a dynamic list of items from drupal.org.

Just as you can add your tweets, Facebook status, and YouTube videos, you can add a set of feeds to your website. But you have to find good feeds first.

Finding feeds can be tricky. Most major websites with content that frequently changes provide feeds. Lots of blog sites have feeds as well. If you want a feed from a specific site, hunting around and looking for a link to a feed is your best bet. The easiest way to find feeds is to use Google Reader to get the address of feeds of interest to you.