Feed Me
If you have been browsing much recently you have very likely seen a link to a ‘feed’. You may, however, not be quite clear on what a feed actually is. This article aims to get you up to speed with feeds.
A feed is basically a reconstitution of your website content in an XML format that allows feedreaders to download it.
OK, I’m right with you, Roger… except for that XML stuff and the feedreader thing. I mean– OK a feedreader reads a feed, but that’s kind of a circular definition, aint it?
Let’s step back a moment and start at the beginning.
Checking one website daily for updates manually may not seem like much of a chore, but when you scale the idea to a even a couple dozen it can get to becoem a time-consuming hassle– especially when you find yourself wasting time visiting sites that haven’t changed since you saw them last. Some people want to get so much news and information that they simply can’t surf to all the sites that may interest them. Somebody decided it would be cool if there were a thing that would download postings to websites they wanted to ’subscribe’ to so they could skim the titles and read what they wanted without having to wade through the actual website itself. Within this idea lies the genesis of feeds and feed readers.
A feed reader is a program (or web-based service) that does exactly what the bedraggled surfer above wanted. A feed reader continually checks the websites you tell it to, downloads all the postings there, and presents them to you in a simplified and possibly categorized form so you can scan through the information quickly selecting what you want to read and ignoring what you don’t want to read alll without even having to open your browser bookmarks.
As mentioned above, a feed is simply the content of a website in a form compatible with feed readers. There are a couple of different types of feeds- RSS and ATOM being the two biggies right now, but as long as you are using a decent feed reader which you pick should be pretty transparent.
This is the simple foundational explanation of the concept of feeds and feed readers. It does get more complex.
For instance many web sites offer feeds of catagories of posts in addition to feeds of all posts. Some even offer feeds of comments on posts. Why would you want a feed on comments? Say you read an interesting web article that had a lot of comments. The comments in fact became an extended discussion on a topic of interest to you. You could use your feed reader to subscribe to the feed of the comments on the post and your reader would then continually download a concentrated form of the discussion you could quickly scan and absorb. Additionally some social bookmarking sites offer feeds on tags– your feedreader downloads articles tagged on the social bookmarking site with the tag you specified.
If you check a lot of websites daily, you might want to consider testing out a feed reader. If you don’t, well now at least you can impress your less computer savvy friends with a new buzzword.