What you need to know about feeds

feedicon Feed, Web Feed, RSS, Atom, Syndication ? Have you seen this shape feed-icon.gif  and wondered what it is, what it does or what it is for? It indicates a feed and you can usually click on it to get web site updates (known as subscribing). What is a feed and why should you care? At the basic level a feed is a file much like a text file that contains information you may be interested in. Feeds are rapidly becoming a common and popular way of getting information from feed enabled web sites – subscription is usually free!

Imagine getting your newspaper or magazine (or web site!) and it only contained things you were interested in – no frilly bits (though frilly bits are starting to appear in some feeds!). There are many interest specific sites out there including Blogs on all manner of subjects and many of these sites offer a feed so rather than you having to book mark a site and regularly check for updates you can instead have those updates delivered to you as and when they happen. Some services allow you to receive updates as and when they happen and others will let you also have them in a daily and weekly format. Some feeds contain just a snipped of information that allow you to go to a fuller version if it interests you whilst others will contain the complete article – this is generally down to the site editor to decide. If you no longer want to receive updates from a particular feed you simply delete it from your feed list.

RSS and Atom describe different ways in which the file containing the information is organised. Often this is contained in something called an XML file (which is a text file that uses simple tags for organisation).

You typically need a way of accessing a feed using either a program or an online service, there are a number of ways of accessing feeds including:

Feeds are very useful and, once you are subscribed to a feed, allow you to obtain information quickly without having to trawl through web sites.

Other sites talking about Web Feeds include:

To subscribe to the feed for this site simply click on the orange symbol feed-icon.gif