Web Syndication The Open Standard Feed and How To Grab Them
In a time before social media and user geenrated content sites were deominate in the way they are now, the internet was largely made up of smaller sites and blogs that were self hosted or hosted through a paid service. This means if you wanted to see if the site had an updated or new article, you'd had to phsyically go to that url. It was not centralized, and it can be a bit of pain to keep up with everything.
Little did this small baby Rambler know at the time that there was a standard to pull site updates into an aggregate feed that you could see in your lesure without an annoying notification going off. Enter Web Syndication protocols with the most well know being RSS, with Atom being a notable second.