what the heck is this stuff?

Rather than roam all over web everyday in order to keep up with your favorite sites and news, many people are using Feed Readers. These are either online or offline applications that collect information from your favorite web places and bring them all to one page or interface. You often have options on how to view all this information including formatting, filtering, alerts, etc. It can be very convenient, allowing you to get a grip on the fire hose of data available on the web and being selective about how you spend your zombic data absorption periods in front of the computer.

If a website has one or more feeds on it, that means it has packaged its information in a format that news reader can recognize. It also implies that the site regularly updates the package with new and changed information. Ultimately, what a reader needs is a link to this package (feed) so that it can check it from time to time for new information. This is often as simple as dragging the icon or link from the webpage and dropping in on your feed reader. Other times you will have to copy the link from the page and paste it to your reader. The most common icon today is an orange square that looks like this: but it may differ in design or color.

If the drag method does not work for your reader (usually the case with online readers) you can copy the feed link by placing your mouse over it and right-clicking to obtain a popup menu. Select the command that will copy your link. Then go to your reader and paste it in as directed by the instructions for your reader; often it is just a box labeled Feed URL or Feed Link.

Most readers will also take a list of feeds. A link for a feed list may have an icon that looks similar to: . They are often called OPML files. OPML is simply the format of the file; it is an ideal format for creating outlines categorized lists.

You will also find the terms RSS and Atom bandied about when it comes to feeds. An explaination of these is beyond the scope of this primer and for the most part is not useful for the casual user of feeds. These are two different possible formats for the "packages" mentioned above. The capabilities of these two formats is very much the same at the time this article was written and it is very difficult to find a feed reader today that doesn't handle both equally well. The debate about which is the best is hot, political, technical and for the casual user, boring and irrelevant.

So that is a very basic primer on what feeds are. Doodle Alley has 3 feeds that allow you to follow Steve's blog and the comments people post both on his blog and his comics.

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