Web Feed

A web feed is a mechanism that web sites can use to notify subscribers of new content. Software on the web site maintains a file in a format designed to be easily understood by a program called a feed reader, or a feed aggregator, which can monitor multiple sites.

Besides a large variety of standalone feed reading programs, which typically run in the background and alert you when there is something new, feed readers are built into several popular web browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer 7.0. If you are using one of these browsers to display a page from this site, you should see this symbol  somewhere near the top right corner of your browser window. If so, clicking on it should cause your browser to offer to subscribe you to the Public topic on this site. One of the alternatives offered is the Live Bookmark or Livemark. If you set up a live bookmark, then simply clicking on it will give you a drop-down list of the titles of recent articles.

Firefox users can refer to the Mozilla support site's pages on Live Bookmarks and Reloading Live Bookmarks. By default, Firefox updates all your live bookmarks in the background every 60 minutes, by checking the web feed file associated with each one for changes.

I use the akregator feed aggregator to monitor 40+ sites, and find it much more convenient than checking multiple live bookmarks. It is part of the Personal Information Manager application suite from KDE.

For those who for one reason or another need to use MS Windows, a web search for rss aggregator windows gets lots of hits. Feedback from members having experience with any of these would be appreciated.

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Last Updated: Tuesday, September 15 2009 @ 04:54 PM PDT|Hits: 2,019