Subscription Feeds

You may have noticed those links on the right listed as "Subscription Feeds".

So what are these and how can you use them?

All Blogs and Podcasts, as well as many other web content pages, have an associated feed that "sends out" its content to users who subscribe to it. It's similiar to a listserv or mailing list, except that it is entirely web based, not email based.

The IRC Blog has a feed of http://ircathcc.blogspot.com/atom.xml. Please note that this link is an XML/RSS file (The technical specs of a web feed) and is not readable by ordinary web browsers. But you can use this link to subscribe using numerous available services. I am going to talk about three of these below, but there are certainly others.

Yahoo allows you to add feeds to your http://my.yahoo.com page which is available free with a Yahoo account. This is an excellent place to read all of your blogs and news in one location. We
have a direct link to use this service on the right.

Google has 2 free services that allow you to manage and read your feeds. They are Google Homepage and Google Reader and we also have a direct link to their services on the right. They are both very good, with Google Homepage being a personal favorite of mine.

Last on our list, but probably the most impressive service so far, is Bloglines. This free service from ask.com, is in my opinion, the easiest and cleanest method for reading and navigating
your desired web content. If you attended the February 21st Brown Bag Lunch, I presented a small demonstration of how it works. I have been using it for only a couple of weeks, but I am already wondering how I ever "read" the web before this was around.

I hope this helps you understand Feeds, or RSS Feeds as you may see them called. They are becoming a more important and integral part of the web community. In a future posting, I will talk about Podcasts, which is another feed based system of content delivery.