How to use RSS feeds
An RSS feed is a text-based headline with a link, and usually a short summary. The RSS feeds is a technology that allows the subscriber to receive updates from their preferred sites. The news is collected at a central location which makes it easier for the end user who does not have to go through each website independently.
It is easy to distinguish that the site is RSS-enabled because of the orange rectangular button that is labeled with either RSS or XML somewhere on the page. RSS is a notification system used to alert subscribers to changes made to their favorite web sites, blogs, music sites, etc. Web-based feed readers are built right into a browser, requiring no special software installation.
RSS is one of the best things that has happened to the web after email. Not only has it made browsing a lot more productive, convenient you name it, but it has also introduced a number of new ways to interact with content that we could never have imagined before. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, contains either a summary of content or the full text to keep up with their favorite web sites.
There are several other ways you can make use of feeds.
- By sending RSS feeds to email it is useful. If you are more of an email person and like to follow-up on everything from your email inbox then this is for you. SendMeRSS can take any feed and forward updates to your email. It checks for updates at least once in every two hours so whenever something new gets published it lands in your inbox within at most 2 hours.
- Forward Emails to RSS feed Enter Mail Bucket, a simple online app that can generate custom RSS feeds for your emails. The implementation is quite simple, first you need to create a filter in your email program and set it to forward filtered messages. While it may be neither convenient nor secure to forward all emails to feeds.
- Send RSS feeds to Twitter using Twitter Feed. It?s a free service that can be set to track several RSS feeds and send updates to a Twitter account. If you got a blog, you may also consider setting up a separate Twitter account for your blog and ?twit? all your blog feeds so that other Twitter users can ?follow? it.
- Send RSS feeds to Phone Get feed updates as SMS messages. It?s absolutely free and works with any cell phone that can receive standard text messages. Nothing to install or download.
- Print RSS feeds to PDF you can subscribe and convert multiple RSS feeds to an elegant printable newspaper. Just grab your favorite feeds, set preferred layout and generate a printable newspaper-style document. This is something that would go extremely well with news and lengthy articles.
- Send Reminders to Feed reader Quick and simple way to schedule one-time or recurrent reminders to your feed reader. Just fill-in the reminder form, set start and end dates, and press create button to generate custom feed for your reminder.
- TagMindr offers a simple way to remind yourself of webpages or some images you find while browsing the web. Once it?s set you will be able to easily remind yourself of a link or image that gets bookmarked in your Delicious, Twitter, Flickr or Magnolia accounts.
- Send RSS feeds to IM Receive feed updates in your chat program. Feed crier supports AIM, MSN Messenger, Jabber and Google Talk clients.
- Monitor feeds for Keywords ZapTXT enables you to monitor RSS feeds for specific keywords and get alerts as soon as there is a new article that includes specified keywords. Alerts can be set to be delivered to email, instant messaging program or mobile phone
- FeedBurner is a free RSS feed management application offered to webmasters by Google. The service aims to superpower your RSS feeds by enabling you to easily integrate a variety of multimedia.
- Page Feeder lets you easily create and customise an RSS feed for your pages. Customize your feed using the settings page or via URL parameters. This plugin is great for those who use WordPress as a CMS solution and is my personal favorite.
RSS feeds enable you to get update notifications delivered directly to your desktop through the news aggregator software program of your choice RSS offers a convenience because you can subscribe to feeds from several Internet sites and automatically pull together headlines from all the sources into one list. This lets you quickly browse the list of new content without visiting each site.