What is a Feed? (Email Subscriptions or Syndication and Aggregation...)

So if you've ever wondered what a feed is... or what "RSS" or "Atom" is... or if you've just wondered how to set up an email subscription service, read on... When I first started blogging, I used the email list available through Blogger to send out my latest posts to friends and family. But Blogger limits that list to 10 email addresses. And, well, I happen to have lots of friends and family! So, I started nosing around to find out about creating an email subscription service directly on my sidebar - which means that folks can sign up "ad-hoc" for the service, rather than being "hard-coded" into my blog settings. And that's when I learned about burning and reading feeds. It was a touch-and-learn process for me, but I soon found out that they can do a lot more than just provide email subscriptions! "Burning" the feed is done by the blog or website owner, and publishes the feed for anyone who would like to subscribe. "Reading" the feed is done by the subscriber, and can be done in many different ways. If you use igoogle, you can create a reader for your favorite blog or website, directly on igoogle - and that way you don't have to go visit the site to get their updates. Any site that lets you create and designate the feeds you would like to subscribe to, in a way becomes your "dashboard" to the web. When there is a new post or update, you can just see that on your reader. Or in much the same way, you can get these updates in your inbox, instead of navigating to a certain website everyday. I found a great article that explains it in very simple terms, on the Six Apart website. I use Feedburner for my feeds, and I love their web analysis capability, but there are TONS of different feed burning services out there. The most well known seem to be Feedburner and Feedblitz, but I would encourage you to explore what's out there - I know that Google offers free feedburning now, too. Once you select a Feedburning service they should provide a plug-in that will allow you to add a "Subscribe to My Blog" gadget to your own sidebar. Six Apart provides their own tools, so their doing a bit of promotion here - but I liked the simplicity with which they explained the concepts, so instead of going on further I will just share what I found on Six Apart here... About Feeds Many websites have links labeled "XML" or "RSS" or "Atom". All of these are ways of saying that you can find out about updates to that site without having to visit the site in your web browser. This feature is referred to as "syndication" or "aggregation". Sometimes it's just called subscribing. And these days, instead of one of these words, lots of sites will use a little orange button. The standard one looks like this: It's also common to see buttons that say "RSS" or "XML", which looks like this: All these links and buttons mean the same thing: The site you're viewing has a feed available. We've provided a little bit of information here on how you can get easily get started reading feeds for free. We'll also tell you how you can publish a feed of your own, if you'd like. 1. Getting Started Who Publishes Feeds? Anyone that publishes on the web can publish a feed. Blogs (or weblogs) were one of the first types of sites to offer feeds, and since that's what we do at Six Apart, we're glad they're so popular. But most major newspapers and news websites, hobbyist sites, and even stores like Amazon.com all offer feeds, too. 2. What Do I Need? Just like when you want to watch a video clip or listen to music on the web, you need a "player" of some kind to subscribe to feeds. Good news: Most of these tools are free, and there are many to choose from, so you can find the one that best suits you. The "player" for a feed is called a feed reader. This tool lets you subscribe to any feeds you want, checks automatically to see when they're updated, and then displays the updates for you as they arrive. Feed readers can run on your computer or you can sign up to use a feed-reader that runs on the web. If you use one of the web-based readers, you can access your feeds from anywhere you go, just by signing into the website that manages your feeds. If you use a feed reading program that installs on your computer, your feeds can be stored for you even if you're not connected to the Internet. 3. What Feed Reader Should I Use? Here's a list some of the most popular tools our customers have told us they like. On the web: If you don't want to have to install a program, many people choose My Yahoo!, Google Personalized Homepage, My MSN, or My AOL to read feeds right within the home page that their browser starts in. Other providers of web-based feed readers include Rojo. Bloglines, Attensa Online, or NewsGator Online. All of the web-based services are free. Also free is our own service, LiveJournal, which is a blogging community that also lets you read feeds on your friends page. On your computer: If you want a feed reading program that runs on your own computer, there are a few options. Anyone using the Mozilla Firefox web browser has support for feeds built-in, and Microsoft Windows users have support for feeds in Internet Explorer 7. Apple Macintosh users can also use the built-in support for feeds in the Safari web browser. If you want a separate program to read feeds, you can use FeedDemon or NewsGator for Microsoft Outlook or Attensa for Outlook if you're on Microsoft Windows. Both tools let you switch between these programs and the web-based reader at any time. If you're on a Macintosh running OS X, the most popular feed reader is NetNewsWire, which can also connect to the web-based services. 4. Subscribing to Feeds Once you've got a tool to read feeds, you'll want to find some feeds worth reading. Many of the tools listed above provide some built-in feeds to get you started. Then, as you visit other sites on the web, you can keep your eyes open for links that say XML or RSS or Syndication, or for that orange button up above, and add the feeds you find interesting. Naturally, we think you should check out our company's feed, too. It's called the Six Apart News Feed, and if offers information from all of our blogs. 5. Publishing a Feed If you're taken by the convenience and power of being able to deliver information regularly right to the screens of anyone who's interested, you might want to publish your own feed. The good news is, it's surprisingly easy.