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What is RSS?

Note: usually you don’t have to worry about RSS feeds because that’s just the technology used in the background, and our servers detect your RSS feeds automatically.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and provides a website’s information in a structured format so that other software – such as RSS readers or follow.it – can understand it. 
Every modern website builder or CMS (Content Management System) automatically generates an RSS feed for new websites. For example, if you own a WordPress website at www.sample-website.com, the RSS feed for that website should be located at www.sample-website.com/feed.  

When you open an RSS feed like www.sample-website.com/feed directly in your browser you may see this:

For you, this may not appear structured at all, but other programs (including follow.it) can understand it as it contains all the relevant information, e.g. when a new story was posted, its title, the link to the story and so on. 

follow.it uses RSS feeds to check if there is a new story on your site – and if we find a new story, send a notification to all your followers. Therefore, the RSS feed needs to be live and valid. You can check if your RSS feed is valid in any RSS feed validator, for example, this one.

When setting up your follow.it-feed, you can either enter the RSS feed directly or the naked website URL such as www.sample-website.com, as our servers are able to detect the location of your RSS feed. If however you want to enter the RSS feed directly, but don’t know where to find it on your site, please read “Where do I find my website’s RSS feed?”.