Tip No. 8: familiarise yourself with web feeds – the essential technology in understanding blogging.
Feeds are simply a technology standard that allow people to receive updates to web-based content.
What sometimes gets confusing is that they go by several different names – web feeds RSS, feeds, XML, and several other names. The industry has decided on web feeds as the official name.
Feeds allow you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from sites you are interested in. This saves you time by not needing to visit each site individually. It reduces the need to manually go and check a Web site to see if it has been updated.
You may have noticed this icon on our blog and others – it’s the RSS feed icon! Traditionally these icons were usually orange, but often site owners change the colour to be more compatible with their website look and feel, like we’ve done.
You can subscribe to our feed by clicking on this icon. This brings you to our page on Feedburner, a free service that helps both feed publishers and feed subscribers by making it easier to use feeds.
Notice we have also made it possible for you to receive updates of new posts by email – you can simply enter your address and click submit – this will deliver new blog posts straight to your inbox. (We never have and never will spam you).
Ok, so what about feed readers?
Feed Readers are tools that allow you to read and manage your feed subscriptions all in one place.
Yep, that’s it! Again, nice and simple. Of course you know how we geeks like to give everything 16 different names, so they’re also sometimes referred to as feed aggregators, RSS readers and news aggregators.
There are different types of feed readers – some that run on your desktop, some that are completely web-based and Google even have a mobile version of theirs which runs great on web enabled mobiles. Here’s a selection of some of the most popular ones:
- Bloglines
- FeedDemon
- Google Reader
- Netvibes
- Newsgator
Update: here’s a cool video about RSS that I found over on Tom’s blog – thanks!
That’s all on feeds for today – please post any questions or comments below – right after you subscribe to our web feed :-)
