Why 'What is RSS?' post is needed?

One of the important things considered in valuing a blog is by its " number of subscribers". That little orange button with waves on it, that is displayed in the blog page, is the entry point for the visitors of your site to become ardent followers of your blog.

But it is true that there are not many who know what feed is and why should one click on that orange icon and even after clicking where to go from there. This is the reality.

However good your content be, it is your responsibility to not let your readers miss your blog, just because they feel it is too much of an effort to go to all the sites they like.

Making your readers know that following many blogs is not that difficult and it becomes easy multifold if they subscribe to the RSS Feed(the orange button in the blog).

In this post, I try my best to put across 'what Feed is and why should you get used to this tool' to the visitors of iPENthisBLOG.

What is a feed?
Feed is yet another useful tool, just like any other online tools like email, chat etc., Many come online to browse, some for chatting and some for accessing their mailbox. Feed is a tool aiding your browsing.

There could be many sites you would like to visit every day and as days go by this list would keep on growing, sometimes and most often crossing hundreds. This could force you to leave track of some very good sites.

And also to cover many sites in a short time, feeds come handy. What is achieved on subscribing to a feed is - "just like you getting mails, instead you get updates from the website not to your mailbox but to another client called 'Feed Readers'(explained later), whenever a new content is posted on that site.

Feeds are mostly and effectively used in blogs where contents are added regularly, than other websites.

RSS, FEED, WEB FEED, ATOM are all used interchangeably to denote feeds in many sites. For more details visit Wikipedia

How to subscribe/use a feed?
Now a days, icons are used asking readers to subscribe to the feeds. The famous icon representation of a feed is the orange button with white colored waves on it, which would be displayed somewhere in the blog having FEED option. Even many browsers display the icon in addressbar or in the toolbar if the particular site has FEED.

The default icon is this and one of its variation is used in this site under "Main Feed" in the sidebar.

On clicking the icon, you would be taken to the feed url, Copy this url and paste it in your favourite Feed reader. Feed readers are nothing but clients or tools to view the feeds just like gmail and yahoo is used to view your mails.

Just like mail clients are available both offline (Outlook express, Mozilla Thunderbird) and online (gmail, yahoo), Feed readers are also available both online(Google Reader, Newsgator) and offline (RssOwl, RSSBandit).

There are many options for you to choose from. Opting for online is better so that you could follow your sites from anywhere.

Now a days instead of having a separate 'Feed Reader', this feature is inbuilt in many of now popular browsers like IE, Opera etc.,

Here in iPENthisBLOG, feeds are provided for iPENthisBLOG blog and for also other sub-blogs like domains@iPENthisBLOG with direct links to many famous feed readers like yahoo, newsgator etc., for you to add them easily.

If you are interested in the contents of iPENthisBLOG, you could subscribe for it or if you are interested in domain names, you could subscribe to domains@iPENthisBLOG alone.

Hope now you know, 'What is RSS/FEED/ATOM'.

You might like to look at these guidelines before choosing to subscribe to any feed.

This article is written keeping in mind the reader's lack of knowledge with many jargons and hence for clarity they have been used in place of the other with the sole aim of keeping the article easily understandable.