Quasi una fantasia (Mac's Blog)

This purpose of this post is to explain web feeds. Most of my motivation for writing this is so that I don’t have to explain to people what I mean when I suggest they “subscribe to” my blog.

A web feed is, generally, a list of updates to a website. You subscribe to a web feed by copying the URL of the web feed into a piece of software known as a feed reader. You then are notified of all updates to all the websites you subscribe to whenever you check the feed reader. Thus, you don’t have to visit each you’re interested in frequently to manually check for updates.

There are a number of formats for web feeds. To subscribe to a web feed, your feed reader needs to understand that format. The most common format is RSS (which, actually, has gone through several revisions). Another common format is Atom.

I’m currently subscribed to 40 feeds for various websites. Before using a feed reader, I probably had around 10 websites I would check fairly frequently for updates. So, by using a feed reader, I’ve (more or less) broadened my ability to take in new information from websites I care about by fourfold. I’ve also eliminated tons of wasted time spent randomly browsing the Web.

I also use a feed reader to follow Twitter streams.

For the most part my only chance I have of having people read my blog posts is if they subscribe to one of my feeds (see right column for category-only feeds; a link to a feed for any post is at the bottom of this page). I will also tweet about some posts in Twitter, so that people who follow me on Twitter (but aren’t subscribers) are aware of new posts.

Liferea (LInux FEed REAder) is an excellent feed reader for Linux. For anybody with a Web browser, Google Reader is a decent option.

P.S. I would  appreaciate it if you let me know if you subscribe to one of my feeds (by its nature, feed subscription is anonymous), but if you’d rather not tell me, that’s fine too.