Already familiar with RSS? You can find my site's feed here: Subscribe via RSS
If you're used to following people on social media and comics on platforms like ComicFury and Webtoon, you might not know how to get notified for updates when people have their own independent websites. Like this one! Or my comic's!
Maybe you have a big folder of bookmarked comics that you check periodically, or maybe you've memorised their update schedules, or maybe you just follow people on social media and hope that if they update their sites they make a post about it and you happen to be online at the right time to see it.
Those are ways you could keep up to date with independent sites, but what about when they don't have a schedule they follow? Wouldn't it be nice if you could track and actually get notified when these sites update?
What did people do before social media to keep up with sites like these, anyway?
Well! They used RSS!
RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, is a way of allowing people to get notified when you make an update to your website. First you want to choose a feed reader, and with that you can then subscribe to any RSS/Atom feed you find online. These feeds will be indicated by the RSS icon: !
I personally use a browser extension that makes a little sound when there's a new update because I like knowing immediately when something I've subscribed to has updated, but other people will use a reader app that they check every now and then like their emails. Here's some options you could use:
- the Feedbro browser extension
- the fluent reader desktop application
- the feeder android app
- the cross-platform feedly site (+ browser extension, this combo is my personal choice as it syncs across devices!)
- the Fraidycat browser extension / desktop application. this one's a little different to the rest. Rather than showing you every feed item as they come in, you give feeds a priority level, and it'll show you posts every now and then based on that. If you're planning to follow hundreds of feeds and stop using social media, this ones for you!
Anyway once you've got yourself a feed reader, you'll be able to subscribe to any website that has a feed set up—which will be most websites! If they're using a CMS, such as Wordpress or Grawlix, then it'll create the feed for them. Even social media accounts tend to have their own feeds! And so do comics hosted through platforms like Webtoon, ComicFury, and Tapas.
If you dont see an RSS button on a website, you might have some luck by visiting /feed or perhaps /feed.xml, or /rss slash /rss.xml, and you can also try just putting the site's url into your feed reader and see if it can find the feed for you. If you really can't find one, send them a message and ask if they can set one up!
And if you're currently subscribed to comics and blogs on various different platforms, I recommend you re-subscribe to them through your feed reader so you can get all your updates in one place :)