Feed Me

While you are online, what would you do to find the latest current events, news, weather, stock market, traffic, travel tips, etc. ?

Most of your answers would be this: "Well, first I would log on to cnn.com or msnbc.com or foxnews.com to read the current events and breaking news. Then I would check another website for local weather. Then I'd have to check yet another website for stock quotes, traffic and travel." Sometimes getting to that website to find that nothing new has been posted. So all the while you are wasting valuable time jumping from site to site rather than being able to READ all of this information from one place.

Enter: The RSS Feed

What is a feed?

Your favorite news sites and blogs and just about any websites that has got frequently updated content, probably have feeds that you can subscribe to. Somewhere on the site (usually at the very top or very bottom of the page) is the feed icon. They are usually shown at the home page or through out the website as an orange icon. It lets the users or visitors of the site know about the updates to the site without actually visiting the site. In some cases, the full content and not just the summary is provided through these Feeds.

Many websites publish lists of updates—called "feeds"—that indicate when they've posted new content. When you subscribe to a feed, Google Reader monitors that feed and keeps track of all updates. You don't have to give any personal information, it doesn't cost a dime, and it's easy to unsubscribe.

RSS is the abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication. Around the end of 2002, RSS came into use.

A RSS file is known as an XML file that gets created when new content is updated to a website. The software that updates the site with the new content also updates this file to include the links and summaries to it, and remove the older ones.

The website would always maintain an updated RSS file, and with all the visitors/readers of the site who have subscribed would know about it since their feed reader would fetch this latest RSS file for them. This saves the trouble for visitors/readers to constantly check their websites for updates. Once they come to know of the updates from their Feed Reader, they have the choice of visiting the website to further interact, and in some cases read the full content.

In the next posts, we will learn something more about different types of Feed Readers and learn how to use one in particular called Google Reader.

Register for a class on Google Reader at www.thepcteacher.com. Classes take place in Ramsey, NJ.

Next class on Google Reader is 10/28/09 at 10:30am.