Web Feeds

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What is the meaning of the little orange icon?

The orange square with white radio waves (Web feed symbol) is the de facto industry standard symbol to signify a Web feed (see the What are Web feeds? section below). Originally, this icon (introduced at the end of 2004) was used in the Mozilla Firefox browser. Then, in December 2005, the Microsoft IE team and Outlook team announced in their weblogs that they would be adopting the feed icon for Internet Explorer 7 and Outlook 12, respectively. Also, in February 2006, Opera announced that they too would use the same feed icon in their next release of Opera 9. With such widespread adoption, the symbol has thus effectively become an industry standard for representing a Web feed.

Other feed icons that are sometimes used by Web sites which publish Web feeds are ones that feature the letters XML or RSS. Overall, the general de facto standard for Web feed icons seems to be to use an orange-colored background and white for lettering or symbols.

What are Web feeds?

A really simple way of describing Web feeds would be that they are special Web pages which are designed to be read by computers rather than people. The reason for this is that certain software applications (such as modern Web browsers, or software programs known as feed aggregators or feed readers) can automatically receive changes that have been made to a feed when entries are updated or new entries are added. Web feeds are actually text documents (just like (X)HTML documents, which are really just text documents with special markings sprinkled throughout the text) which contain sets of discrete content items. They are often used as an alternative way of presenting news stories or weblog posts. One way to think of Web feeds is as the Internet version of the news tickers which crawl along the bottom of the screen during some television news programs.

For more information on what Web feeds are, please see the Wikipedia entry on Web feeds.

How can I start using Web feeds?

There are a few ways in which you can start using Web feeds. The first way is through the use of a feed aggregator (also called a news reader), which is a piece of software that you install on your computer, and periodically check Web feeds to see if any part of the feed has changed. The second way is by using a Web browser that has the ability to aggregate Web feeds built-in to the browser. A third way is to install a piece of software that integrates itself into a Web browser that does not have the ability to read Web feeds already built into it. My own personal preference is to use a Web browser with feed aggregating capabilities built right in. I highly recommend Mozilla's Firefox browser.

Once you have chosen a method, and have installed the corresponding piece of software, all you have to do is to decide which Web feeds you would like to start receiving. When you add a feed to your list, it is known as subscribing to that feed (but unlike most newspaper or magazine subscriptions, all Web feeds subscriptions are free!).

If you are using the Mozilla Firefox browser, then you can already use Web feeds. Firefox refers to feeds as "Live Bookmarks", since the feeds show up within the Bookmarks list in the Firefox browser. If Firefox detects that the author of a Web site has made a Web feed available, a clickable orange feed icon (Web feed symbol) will appear at the right side of the location bar at the top of the browser. When you click on the feed icon, you will be prompted for where you would like to add the feed, just like a regular Web page bookmark.

What is Atom? What is RSS?

Still working on the text for this section.

Why did you pick Atom instead of RSS?

Still working on the text for this section.