You could start searching on the internet for more information on these site feeds, but most of the time you need to be quite a computer freak to be able to understand what the hell they are talking about.
So let me try to shed some light on this subject for you.
Take me for example. Since I am a full-time computer geek and internet addict, I read about 30 blogs on a daily basis. Yes, 30, at least. You might ask yourself where I find the time to read them all. Well, that is where these feeds come in handy.
RSS, Atom and XML are 3 different standards, but theoretically they do the same thing. They create a basic text layout of your blog entries, so that they can easily be imported into an RSS-reader (a program that can import these texts).
The RSS-reader that I use is Bloglines. It has 3 major advantages: it is free, it can read all 3 feed standards and it is an online RSS-reader. This means you don't have to install it on your computer, and that you can check your favourite blogs for updates on every computer in the world with an internet connection.
So how does it work?
You create an account in bloglines. This is totally free and only takes a minute. Then you go to the 'My Feeds' tag, and click on 'add' to add one of your favourite blogs. You enter the blog or feed URL (for example: http://welcomeatthe.blogspot.com) and bloglines checks if this blog publishes one of the 3 feeds. If he finds one or more, you can subscribe to one of them and a link is added to 'my feeds' (The 3 feeds normally give the same result, so subscribing to one of them should do the trick).
Once you click on the link that is created in 'my feeds', bloglines considers the entries that you see of this blog to be read. Now every time you enter bloglines and that blog link is in bold, this means that there is a new entry on that blog that you haven't read yet.
bloglines also has a notifier. You install it, and it creates an icon in the windows toolbar. By right-clicking on it you enter the e-mail adress in the settings that you used to log in to bloglines. Now every time a blog you subscribed to has a new entry, the icon notifies you of this.
So instead of checking each blog every half hour to see if you guys have written an entry yet, I get notified by an icon when you do. That's the advantage of these feeds.
6 comments:
nice post! very informative. isn't i who ask you about this? ha ha ha. i'm a novice in such thing...guilty as charge. :)
Yes, you did ask me about this, didn't you, Amie. But since there are so many people who don't really understand what it's about, I decided to write a post about it. By the way, I can read your blog feed fine. So you don't have to worry about that anymore.
I use blogliner for a while now, I love it but I only added a few to it, should add them all though. Well, I'm going to start with it right away by adding you :)
I just got XML and bloglines, well that's still confusing to me. I am too lazy to go through all that:)
This is so helpful. I just linked my blog to Link2Blogs and this is how I came across your blog. I was wondering what all this stuff is about. So thanks a ton for the education.
I'm glad I was able to help you understand these things.
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