Intro to Web feeds

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What are feeds?

Web feeds (RSS feeds, Atom feeds, webfeeds, or just feeds) make it easy to keep up with websites you'd like to keep track of, without visiting each one to see if anything is new. Feeds bring changes from your favorite sites to one central spot. You subscribe to feeds with a feed reader. Subscribing is easy and unsubscribing is instant. :-)

Web feeds work somewhat like newsletters, but they're a better solution. You "subscribe" to a newsletter by giving your email address to a mailing list. In contrast, you "subscribe" to a Web feed by adding the feed's address to your feed reader. That creates a "pull", not a "push" connection.

Virtually all blogs and most dynamic websites -- those that regularly add fresh content -- have Web feeds these days. Baseball related websites and blogs are a good example. There's always something new, even during the off season. If you're a fan, you'd probably want to follow at least a few of them. You could easily follow a dozen if you wanted to.

Your feed reader periodically checks the feed for each of the blogs or websites you're following to see what, if anything, is new. If something looks interesting, you can go directly to the originating website and view the rest of the content. [more]

Examples of feeds:

It's not easy to explain just how feeds work with simple prose. You'll catch on quicker by just trying a few of them. ;-)

Original Signal is an all-on-one-page feed reader. There are various topic pages there -- buzz, jobs, tech, digg, gadgets, etc. You may not be interested in those specific topics but you'll get a feel for feeds there.

You can find webfeeds for virtually any topic -- sports, digital photos Edinburgh, world news, movie reviews, Microsoft, the blues -- anything that strikes your fancy.

A few more examples: Robert Scoble is a prolific, entertaining geek-blogger. Thomas Hawk's photos on the Flickr photo blogging site. Jim McLennan's blog on the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Google blog.

Subscribing to feeds

There are several ways to discover the Web feed for a website -- if it has one.

On many websites, a Web feed icon -- -- will show up in the "Address Bar" of your browser. Just click it and follow directions.
Look for the RSS badge -- , or or a plain "RSS" link -- somewhere on the website.

Sometimes you'll see "RSS 0.9", "RSS 2.0" or "Atom" links. Most feed readers can use any of them. (I'd pick Atom or RSS 2.0.) Some readers can only use one of the formats. Pick the one that works for you.

If you see one or more of these "chicklets" -- , or -- and you are using one of the related sites as your feed reader you can simply left-click the badge, and if all goes well, the feed will automagically be added to your subscriptions.

Once you've discovered the feed, you can subscribe to it using the proceedure for your particular feed reader. It will be similar to the process for subscribing to HTCC feeds.

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Finding feeds

There are many ways to find feeds that you'd be interested in, but search and lists are a couple of good ones.

NewsGator: search for blogs and Web feeds
Google Blog Search
Comic Alert: get your favorite comics