RSS is terrible as a format (Atom is much better), but RSS is awesome as an idea. If your web site were a database, RSS would be like WAL. If your website were differentiable, it would be like its derivative, or rather a Lagrangian, taken at the moment of last update.
(BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)
I like the general term "Web feed" as an umbrella term, I found about that on this article https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-web-feeds
Also that blog has some other good related articles:
- What is RSS: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-rss
- What is Atom: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-atom
- What is JSON feed: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-json-feed
- What are feed readers: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-feed-readers
- What is OPML: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-opml
We should popularize a JSON-based alternative, we'll call it "Absurdly Simple Syndication."
And instead of "feeds", call them "holes". And instead "subscriptions", they're "heads up". Dave Winer's would be the biggest with the most!
https://web.archive.org/web/20070910131413/http://news.com.c...
Because the main content of a blog post is an article, markup actually works really nicely. Although I suppose you could embed HTML in a JSON string
How about JSON Enhanced Syndication and Tracking?
Your site's RSS feed is just another view of the items on your site, no? It's the RSS _reader_ that "differentiates" it for you?