What Are RSS and Atom? Understanding How Feeds Work

Every day, thousands of new pieces of content are published on the internet. But instead of visiting a website every day to check “is there a new post?”, did you know you can follow new content automatically?

That is where RSS and Atom come in.

What Is a Feed?

A feed is a special data stream that presents a website’s published content in a machine-readable format.

It is usually in XML format, and you can often find it at URLs like:

1site.com/feed
2site.com/rss
3site.com/atom.xml

When you open these URLs in your browser, you will not see a normal web page. Instead, you will see structured data in XML format.

What Is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format that lets you automatically follow new content on websites.

It is commonly used by:

• Blogs
• News websites
• Podcast publishers
• Content platforms

What Is Inside an RSS Feed?

In an RSS entry (an item), you will typically see fields like:

• title → The content title
• link → The content URL
• description → A short summary
• pubDate → Publication date
• author → Author information
• category → Category or tag
• enclosure → A file (for example, a podcast mp3)

Example RSS item structure:

1<item>
2	<title>What is RSS?</title>
3	<link><https://site.com/what-is-rss></link>
4	<description>Basic information about RSS</description>
5	<pubDate>Mon, 12 Feb 2026 10:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
6</item>
7

What Is Atom?

Atom is an alternative feed format developed as a more standardized and structured option compared to RSS.

Compared to RSS, Atom is generally:

• More strict about standards
• Clearer about time formats
• More consistent in data structure

In Atom, instead of item, the term entry is used:

1<entry>
2	<title>What is Atom?</title>
3	<link href="<https://site.com/what-is-atom>"/>
4	<updated>2026-02-12T10:00:00Z</updated>
5	<summary>Information about the Atom format</summary>
6</entry>

Differences Between RSS and Atom

Feature RSS Atom Release year Older Newer Standard structure More flexible More strict Adoption Very common Less common, but more modern XML format Yes Yes

In general, on WordPress sites, the /feed path produces an RSS feed.

Why Are Feeds Important?

RSS and Atom let you fetch data without needing an API key.

This enables things like:

• Automatically tracking new content
• Building newsletter systems
• Creating bots
• Aggregating content
• Setting up automation workflows

A feed URL is essentially a website’s content stream exposed to the outside world.

Next Step: Fetching Data from a Feed

In this post, we learned what RSS and Atom are and how they are structured.

In the next post, I will walk through, step by step:

• How to fetch data from an RSS feed URL
• How to automatically read a feed with GitHub Actions
• How to store feed data

Now we know the theory.

Next up is putting it into practice.