Did You Get Feed?

Ok... Some of you may go "huh?", but that is normal if you have not heard of the terms "Feed", "RSS" or "Atom" before. One example is this very blog that you are reading now, if you look to the right column with all the icons at the end, you'll see the orange RSS/Atom Feed icon.

RSS/Atom Feed icons may look like these too:






What it does is very simple. If I update this blog with a new article, the feed will automatically notify you if you subscribe to it. This way, you can subscribe to any website or forum that has a RSS/Atom feed and just check your feeds for any new articles or posts.

In order to subscribe to the RSS/Atom feed, you will need a RSS/Atom feed aggregator. Basically, all it does is to show all your feeds in one place. There are two flavours of feed aggregators, web-based or desktop software. Feeds.reddit has an good web-based feed reader. Google also has a web-based feed aggregator, Google Reader, which you can use to read plain text feeds. If you want to subscribe to feeds with pictures, podcasts or videocasts, you should install a feed aggregator on your computer. Free aggregators which are simple but get the job done are FeedReader and SharpReader. There are more aggregators with much more powerful features that allows you to customize how the feeds are delivered and displayed. A search for "RSS feed aggregators" at Google will yield you many results.

Once you installed a RSS/Atom feed aggregator (or signed up to the web-based ones), you can simply click on the Feed icon on a website to subscribe to it. Your feed aggregator should add the Feed to its list automatically. If it did not, you can also copy and paste the feed URL into your feed aggregator. You will then be able to receive updates from that website!

So, go ahead and get one of the RSS/Atom feed aggregators and remember to subscribe to my Feed too! Get more Feeds on Gadgets and Beauty too!