What Are Feeds???



Whenever we visit any blog, we see orange colored icons like the one on the right. These icons are called as Feeds. Feeds or Web Feeds is a method used to provide content to users who have subscribed to the Feeds .

Feeds are used by blogs to notify the readers about any recent updates. Using feeds we can come to know about the recent topics in our favourite blogs. Subscribing to feeds is a great alternative to Bookmarks  because in bookmarking we have to manually check the blog for any update.

Feeds make our life easier as it brings new content to us rather than we going to the content. We can call Feeds as the Postman of the Blogsphere .It is also used by the blogs to show their popularity. RSS and Atom are the two types of feeds with RSS being more popular.


FEED READERS
Feed Readers are the applications which organize all our feeds at one place. Google Reader and Bloglines are the most prefered Feed Readers.
However Google Reader is the most popular feed reader. It can read both RSS and Atom feeds. Google Reader has a simple and well organized front page in which we can see all the new updates. Using Google Reader we can share even our feeds with our friends. Another important feature of Google Reader is the search feeds. We can search the feeds that we want and subscribe to the feeds there only.
However the Trends option is an unique feature of Google Reader. It shows how many feeds did we read , which feeds were read the most , the subscription trends and the reading trends.

Whenever we want to subscribe to feeds of a desired blog, we can choose two methods to recieve the feeds.
  •Feed Readers
  •Email Subscriptions
We can choose the method of subscription according to our liking. If we read emails regularly and want all the stuff in the mail box then email subscription is the best method.
However if we dont want the mailbox to be filled with emails then we can choose the feed reader option.

Now that we know about feeds we will learn how to add feeds to our blog in the next post









1 comment:

  1. Hi John, thanks for your comments....I have more posts comming from the "Blogger For Beginner" series....btw i dont think tht i need a google search widget as i already have an inbuit search box.....

    thanks for writing.

    ReplyDelete