Web Feed Secrets | How to RSS Feed | What is RSS

RSS and Atom are the best ways to read or serve content aside from visiting a Web site. Learn how to get the most out of the Web feeds you publish and the Web feeds you read.

You see it everywhere online, that little orange icon with wavy “radio” lines. Typically it looks like this (except smaller):

You either know it well or you don’t. For those in the latter group, the question is, What is it?

This icon first appeared in Mozilla Firefox. It was later adopted by Microsoft for Internet Explorer and Outlook, and finally by Opera Software’s browser. When you find it—or similar little graphics or text links that say something like “RSS” or “XML”—you know that the Web site you are visiting has a Web feed (sometimes called a news feed or RSS feed).

Feeds are an option—nay, a necessity—for any site with regularly updated content, from blogs to podcasts to news, from social networks to music listings to video sharing. Not finding a Web feed is inexcusable if you’re a content provider who wants to make sure you have the largest possible audience, whether you update once a year or once an hour.

To understand what a Web feed is requires understanding how Web feeds work. In general, when a Web site is updated, the publishing software that makes the update simultaneously generates an extra text document—the Web feed. Even without Web-publishing software, a site owner can make a feed document.

That document is made available online and is then ready for syndication, which simply means that other Web sites can make the content available to their own readers—typically just the headlines with links.

More often, people use feeds to subscribe to a site, so that the content comes to the reader rather than requiring a search (you know, that old-fashioned, tedious Web surfing). To subscribe to a Web feed, you need a feed reader, of which there are many and sundry types, be it software that you can run on your desktop or Web site services accessed from any browser. What feed readers have in common is the ability to follow multiple Web feeds at once—a process called aggregation. The reader becomes your one-stop location for viewing the sites you would otherwise visit over the course of a day. Instead of your entering lots of URLs or following bookmarks, the content comes to you, because the feed reader is constantly checking Web feed documents for updates (it only looks as if the content is being “pushed” to you; really the feed reader is pulling it down when it’s available).

Web feeds and feed readers are the ultimate distribution tools for those of us who revel in information overload.

Formats: RSS vs. Atom, plus OPML

Web feeds are text files in XML format. A lot like HTML files, they’re meant to be read and interpreted by computer software, not humans. (Any humans who can read them might be Cylons—or programmers.)

As HTML files are read by a browser and translated into the Web pages you enjoy, so too is the XML in Web feeds translated by feed readers. A feed serves up nothing more than the content, separate from the original design found on the original Web page. That’s why a New York Times story in a feed reader doesn’t look exactly like the NYTimes.com Web page; it will look like other feeds. Web feeds are all about spreading the content, not mimicking the look of Web pages.

Web feeds took off in 1999 as various technologies came together that wound up with the name RSS. The history of RSS is complicated as much by politics as by technology, and the name was only part of it. RSS has stood for a lot of different things, depending on what you read and when you read it and what version you use: RDF Site Summary, Remote Site Syndication, Rich Site Summary. The latest RSS, version 2.0, is short for Really Simple Syndication (although who knows, next year it could become Ridiculously Super Syndication) and is backed by an RSS Advisory Board to become a published specification.

RSS is not the only game in town for making Web feeds. The Atom Syndication Format, which does the same thing, created to overcome some of the problems that stemmed from RSS having gone through too many versions over the years. Atom became a proposed standard of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and a darling of Google early on, but that hasn’t stopped the continuing use of RSS. (RSS, for example, allows syndication not only of content but also of enclosed files for downloading. Thus RSS became the preferred method for podcasters who send out MP3 files to listeners.)

Over the course of time, RSS has become a generic term—a Web feed is just as often called an RSS feed, even when it’s in Atom format. For most users, if a Web site offers a feed in both RSS and Atom formats, either one is fine. In fact, you can set your feed reader to subscribe to both and see whether there’s a difference—it’s not as if it costs anything. The Atom feed, for example, includes the byline and full text of each post, while the RSS feed skips the byline and includes only some of the text; you have to link to the site for the full entry. Some sites offer full text of their content in feeds, some don’t, and some offer a choice.

The actual Web-feed document might end in .xml—our own AppScout.com has an Atom feed named atom.xml, and an RSS 2.0 feed named index.xml—or sometimes in .rss.

One last format to be aware of is OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language). It’s become the de facto standard for backing up and restoring an entire list of aggregated Web feeds. Export all your feeds to an OPML file from one feed reader, save it, or import it to another reader you want to try without having to resubscribe at each individual site. The OPML list will contain any categories you have for feeds, the title you use for the feed, the URL for the Web feed (the xmlUrl) and a URL for the originating Web site (the htmlURL). You can name the file whatever you want, but make sure it ends with .opml.

Subscribing to Web Feeds

To subscribe to a Web feed, visit a site you like and click on the RSS icon (like we showed you in the introduction). In Firefox it is at the far right of the browser address bar or in the lower right-hand corner of the status bar at the bottom, but you’ll see the icon only when a Web feed is available. In IE7, it’s part of the toolbar.

Many sites include a chicklet, a little graphic that might read “RSS” or “XML” or “Feed” that you can click to get to the Web-feed page. Some content sites make subscription easy by providing chicklets for a number of different feed readers.

The link behind each chicklet should take you directly to the subscription page for the Web-based feed reader in question, inserting the URL for the Web feed in the appropriate spot for you.

For off-line feed readers, you’ll usually have to right-click the XML or RSS chicklet, copy the URL/address, then paste it in.

If your own site has a Web feed but still doesn’t show the RSS icon in the browser address bar, the page is missing some code. Put the following between the <head> and </head> tags of the Web page:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Subscribe to This Site” href=”url/to/rss/file”>

Be sure to change the title, and the href attribute should point to your Web feed’s URL. An example would be http://www.appscout.com/index.xml.

Browsers as Feed Readers

In Firefox, when you click on the link or chicklet for a Web feed, you get a preview and a choice of various feed readers you can use to subscribe. Most of the options are Web-based readers (Yahoo!, Bloglines, and Google Reader), but you can also choose an off-line application by browsing to the program’s EXE file.

You can also choose to save it as a Firefox Live Bookmark. Doing so makes a bookmark folder that includes links to the most recent entries from that Web feed. Firefox comes with some Live Bookmarks installed by default for news sites like CNN. These take you directly to the stories on the original Web site, however—Firefox doesn’t interpret the Web feed for you.

Firefox, being so extensible, isn’t limited to Live Bookmarks. Sage is a feed reader extension that puts a very standard-looking feed reader right into the browser itself. Sage supports several styles, with differing colors and layouts. You can import OPML files into Sage from other readers. Sage isn’t alone; a search through the Firefox add-ons archive will reveal lots of options for RSS in Firefox. The latest is Feedly, which creates a new home page for you in Firefox onto which RSS data is pulled from sites in your bookmarks and Web-based readers.

Apple’s Safari browser has integrated feed reader support that’s similar to Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. Click an RSS link in the address box for the page you’re on and you’ll see a page preview of the RSS feed, which you can then bookmark. Visit Preferences to tell Safari whether you plan to follow feeds in the browser, and whether the feeds should be bookmarked in the Bookmarks Bar or the Bookmarks menu, or both. You also have the option of telling it to send subscription requests to other feed readers.

In IE7 for Windows, the RSS icon on the toolbar will turn orange when a feed is available; on pages without a feed it will be grayed out. When orange it should provide a drop-down menu with choices if the site has more than one Web feed. Pick one to get a preview page and a link to subscribe. Click it and IE7—which is a full feed reader itself—offers to add the feed to your bookmarks, but not to other feed readers (perhaps with the exception of Outlook 2007). Microsoft likes to keep customers all to itself.

If you do want to subscribe with a separate feed reader when using IE, you’ll need to copy the URL for the Web feed to your clipboard and paste it into the feed reader of your choice. And the choices are plentiful.

Web-Based Readers

Over time, more and more users have migrated to Web-based feed readers for the convenience of being able to access all their feeds at once from any computer that has Internet access. Here’s a quick rundown of the best:

Google Reader Like most of Google’s online tools, this is a best-of-breed product that has quickly surpassed almost all the competition, especially since it integrates with other online tools such as Google Notebook. You can even use it to read feeds when off-line, using Google Gears.

Bloglines Venerable for the world of Web-based feed readers (having been around since 2003), Bloglines combines an easy interface and simple tools like personalized e-mails allowing your newsletters to come to your feed reader. The new beta offers many of the exciting features and Web 2.0–type designs that Google Reader once had exclusively.

NewsGator Online NewsGator is a company that specializes in feed readers of all types, online and off. The online version competes quite well with Bloglines and Google Reader, though it lacks some of the flash.

Windows Live Mail The Web-feed URLs you store in IE7 can be accessed and read in Microsoft’s Web-based e-mail system, making it simple to forward messages, or blog them to Windows Live Spaces.

Shyftr This reader wants to combine feeds with social networking, sharing yours and others so that users can find new feeds they like with ease.

Fav.or.it Brand-new to the scene, Fav.or.it already aggregates feeds from hundreds of sites and shows you the most popular stories on the portal side. Readers can specify feeds for their personal interests. An easy starter site for those getting used to feed readers.

Home-Page Builders

Building portals for your daily entry to Web pages used to be about simple pages filled with links to sites you liked. Today, the leaders in the space heavily incorporate Web feeds to make your home page up to date with new info from the moment you sign in.

iGoogle It’s Google’s ultimately customizable home page, and you can modify it with as many RSS feeds as you can stand. Click Add Stuff and find the link reading Add feed or gadget to paste in a Web-feed URL.

My Yahoo! Yahoo!’s customizable home page was one of the first to embrace Web feeds, and they’ve only become more prominent as the page has been upgraded.

PageFlakes This PC Mag Editors’ Choice for personal Web portals (resembling iGoogle a bit) adds feeds as little widgets (known as “flakes”), which you can move around to suit your desires.

Netvibes Another iGoogle/PageFlakes–type start page with lots of AJAX-y goodness to make it as Web 2.0 as possible, again with widgets that provide access to Web feeds and more.

Eluma Another reader with a social-networking bent, for collecting, organizing, rating, and finally sharing favorite posts gathered from your aggregated feeds.

Spectra for MSNBC The wackiest-looking reader going is limited to the feeds found at MSNBC.com, but that might be for the best. Launch Spectra and the 3D interface loads floating 2D boxes, spinning in space, each with a new headline from the site’s news feeds. Expect more experimental methods of feed reading in the future.

Desktop-Based Readers

You might think it silly to check Web feeds when off-line, but that’s how they began, and many still use these tools—they’re a great way to manage the info overload, not to mention that they let you store info on blog posts and stories you may want to follow up on later. Even better, they’re fast and easy to search.

FeedDemon The epitome of a best-of-breed feed reader, this Windows-only reader not only gives you all the features you could want, it can even sync with online accounts on NewsGator Online.

NetNewsWire One of the first desktop-based Web feed readers specific to the Mac OS, NetNewsWire (owned by NewsGator) was one of the best when it was shareware. Now that it’s free, it’s even better.

Times Another Mac-only reader, this one is specially designed to deliver feeds that look like a newspaper, rather than like e-mail (which is what feeds from most readers look like). You’ll pay $30 for the look (versus nothing for most of these readers).

GreatNews It’s like a combination of a traditional-looking feed reader and Times (above), and it’s free for Windows users. It displays full pages of feeds in snippets it says are easier to digest.

RSS Bandit This open-source feed reader is a constant work in progress. It has some attractive features, including synchronization with online readers like NewsGator Online and Google Reader.

Snackr You’ll need the Adobe AIR runtime installed to run Snackr. It runs feed headlines along the bottom of your screen like a CNN ticker of news only for you. Click a title to pop up a window and read the whole thing. It works in Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The many flavors of Linux need their own software-based feed readers. You can find a list to get you started at RSS Specifications.

Mobile Readers

There are ways to get your RSS fix on your phone, including the iPhone or iPod touch. Typically, you can access them at URLs that start with “m” for mobile, or “i” for iPhone.

Bloglines has a mobile interface (m.bloglines.com) and an iPhone-specific interface (i.bloglines.com), providing access to your feeds. You won’t get the fancy bells and whistles to accommodate a smaller screen, but the iPhone interface in particular has everything you need to read.

NewsGator Go (m.newsgator.com/d) works on BlackBerry or Java-based phones. It’s based on software from FreeRange Communications; alternatively, you can go directly to FreeRange and create an account. NewsGator also has a version for Windows Mobile phones.

Of course, behemoths like Google and Yahoo! have plenty of apps on phones. iGoogle, for example, has an iPhone-specific interface (www.google.com/ig/i) to access its widgets. The iPhone Web Apps list at Apple.com includes one other iPhone-specific app, the iFeeder RSS Reader. On the new iPhone 3G, or any iPhone/iPod touch with the 2.0 firmware installed, you can enter a feed address into the Safari browser and read it and bookmark it. However, the new App Store in iTunes has at least five standalone RSS readers already. That includes the free NetNewsWire and several that cost between $2.99 and $9.99.

E-mail Clients

Reading feeds in most feed readers is similar to reading e-mail. You have a list of feeds on the left-hand side of your screen, and headlines for the selected feed at the top right; the posts show up at the bottom right. Therefore it makes perfect sense for your e-mail client software to handle feeds. Don’t subscribe to too many, though, or they’ll start to feel like spam.

Outlook users—who tend to spend the entire day with Outlook open—can install the free NewsGator Inbox software to turn it into a full RSS manager. It will synchronize feeds with other NewsGator products (read it here and it’s marked as read there, and vice versa).

NewsGator Inbox is necessary only for older versions of Outlook; the current 2007 version fully integrates feed reading. You get an RSS folder, and the headlines look like mail messages. Adding feeds is easy if you use IE and have Outlook 2007 set as your default feed reader—a click on the orange RSS icon will set up a subscription. You can also import OPML files to subscribe to numerous feeds at once. Go to the File menu and select Import and Export, then Import RSS Feeds from an OPML file. You can change several settings for feeds in the Account Settings on the Tools menu.

Thunderbird has similar support for Web feeds. It requires a separate “RSS News & Blogs” account in Thunderbird, which segregates the Web feeds from the e-mail. Once that’s created, you can click the new account name to manage your feeds. Subscribe to one and it shows up in the folder pane. Click on it and you get headlines in the upper pane; click a headline and the full Web page with that post loads.

Of course, just like its sibling Firefox, Thunderbird has add-ons, some of which can assist you in wading through RSS. infoRSS sticks a feed ticker at the bottom of the Thunderbird screen. Forumzilla is a lot like Thunderbird’s integrated Web feed support, but it lets you put the feeds anywhere you want in the folder list, mixing and matching feed headlines with your regular messages.

Widgets

Let us not forget the miracle of widgets. Some are only for the Web, but many work on the computer desktop as well through services like Yahoo! Widgets, Windows Vista Sidebar, or the Macintosh Dashboard. Many are nothing more than a pretty face for a Web feed, and what’s more, some provide a pretty face for feeds of your choice. Do a search on each service for “RSS” and you’ll turn up several free options you can implement. Don’t go overboard: You’ll over-load your screen real estate in no time with too many feeds.

NewsGator has Web-based software called Editor’s Desk that automatically generates widgets for embedding on any Web page, even as a Facebook app, using content drawn from Web feeds. You’ll have to have the ability to edit the code on your Web page to insert the JavaScript that powers the widget.

Podcasts

If reading isn’t enough of an experience for you, then podcasts—with automatically downloaded audio or video programs attached to a Web feed—are probably your cup o’ tea. By the way, podcasts aren’t restricted to iPods. The audio and video are delivered in formats you can play on anything.

That said, iTunes is the center of entertainment existence for many computer users, so naturally Apple built podcast support into the software. In fact, you can subscribe to many podcasts using the iTunes Store interface, but without paying a dime. Whenever you open iTunes, it will grab the latest podcasts so they’re ready to synchronize with your iPod.

Miro is open-source software that combines RSS and A/V playback. It bills itself as being able to “turn your computer into an Internet TV,” and that’s not far off. Set it up with the right feeds for your favorites—including BitTorrent files—and you’ll find them ready for playback in a very TiVo-esque fashion. It runs on Windows, Mac, and even Ubuntu.

Opera Mini, a very popular and powerful downloadable browser for phones, also has a built-in feed reader.

Improving Your Site’s Feed

If you’re an average blogger, you may never have to mess with your Web feed. Services like Blogger or TypePad, and even installed software like WordPress or Movable Type, generate Web feeds automatically. For my personal blog, I checked and found that the version of Movable Type I use creates not only the RSS 2.0 feed I typically promote to readers, but also an Atom file.

Some people want to be more hands-on. If you feel the need to make edits to your RSS and Atom feeds—or even create feeds from scratch, perhaps if there’s no corresponding content on a Web site—there are feed software editors. ExtraLabs Software’s Feed Editor ($35.95 direct) makes it incredibly simple. Enter data in fields, including optional fields for extras you might include in a podcast, and the software spits out a text file ready for upload as your Web feed. ExtraLabs also sells an RSS Wizard that converts HTML to RSS 2.0; RSS2Email, a program that turns feeds into e-mail messages; and Feed Mix, which takes multiple feeds and converts them into one single über-feed. (Another way to make a single feed from multiple feeds is with an online app called feedkiller.)

FeedForAll ($39.95 direct) from NotePage comes in Windows and Macintosh versions, also creates Web feeds from scratch, and offers the ability to “enhance and repair” existing feeds—specifically by making sure your feeds are completely valid under the specification for RSS 2.0.

By the way, it’s a good idea to check your feed for validity at Feed Validator. If Feed Validator deems your feed to be okay, it offers you a little logo. Display it on your site and you’ll get brownie points with the true techies.

If it’s not deemed valid, you may want to try FeedForAll or tweak the code yourself. Many times, the error comes from what is in the original content in the blog itself, not the actual coding. You may have a messed up the <a href> tag, for example, in which case only you can fix it.

Article Source www.pcmag.com