Posted on July 23, 2007 by Admin

What are news feeds?

News feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines as soon as they’re published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.

Feeds are also known as RSS. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people would agree on ‘Really Simple Syndication’. In essence, the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people.

[For those outside the state firewall, this brief video is a great introduction to RSS. The rest of us can watch it from home.]

How do I start using feeds?

In general, the first thing you need is something called a news reader. This is a piece of software that checks the feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications.

Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you either download your e-mail using Outlook, or keep it on a web-based service like Hotmail.

Rss96x96If you would like the latest news from ShowMeGaming.com, look for the orange button on the right side of our pages. If you click on the button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the feed into your news reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader. Most sites that offer feeds use a similar orange button, but some may just have a normal web link.

Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This can make subscribing to feeds much easier. For more details on these, please check their websites.

How do I get a news reader?

There is a range of different news readers available and new versions are appearing all the time. Different news readers work on different operating systems, so you will need to choose one that will work with your computer.

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