RSS feed, What, Why and HowI'm joining the RSS feed club. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Fundamentally, RSS provides a mechanism for sites to "feed" snippets of up-to-date information (such as news) to some RSS search engine or clearinghouse services. Users would then subscribe to RSS feeds from sites of their interest, and would get updated information whenever something changes with sites of their interest (without navigating to these sites and search for updates themselves). The user would use either a RSS aggregrator (such as RSSreader) or in some cases such as Yahoo and Google, have the built-in service to let users read RSS feeds from their personalized homepage. For a in depth tutorial on what RSS is, how to create, publish, and read one, read the RSS feeds - subscribing, creating, submitting a web feed article. There are many tutorials, but I found this one to be the easiest to follow. RSS feed readers typically provides you with an interface to select
a particular feed to add to the reader. For instance in the case of Google,
in the personalized homepage, there is an option for users to "Create
A Section", which in turn provides one with the ability to add an
URL link to the feed xml file. It would then extract the information
from this feed xml page and display the content of that feed file. In
the case of this site, the URL is http://www.PatternsOfNature.net/feed.xml.
To get it from the homepage, right click the Give RSS a try even if you're not interested in using this site's feed, as it gives you more control of what you want to see and not seeing the cookie cutter page that the whole world see. Paste the following to Google or Yahoo etc RSS links
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image,
then select Copy Shortcut [then paste to the field Google provides].
Yahoo does it slightly differently and a bit more complicated, but achieve
the same end result of the feed summary appearing on the personalized
homepage.