RSS is probably the biggest secret of the internet. While its moment of glory seemed to be during the 2000s, and now it's not in the spotlight anymore, it allows easy subscription to websites. It is present in lots of places, and it's incredibly useful.
At its core, RSS is a way of presenting a succession of ordered references (typically articles, but also other elements such as podcast episodes or YouTube publications) and a publishing time. This makes for a very natural way of knowing what articles are new since the last check, as well as presenting some structured data about them, such as the title and a summary.
In this recipe, we will present the feedparser module, and determine how to obtain data from an RSS feed.
RSS is not the only available feed format. There's also a format called Atom, but both are very much equivalent. feedparser is also capable of parsing it, so both can be used indistinctly.