Web feeds explained

What is a web feed?

Web feeds are often referred to as RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Feeds are a popular means of sharing regularly updated content (such as news headlines and blog articles) without requiring readers to constantly visit a Web site to see what's new. Feeds contain titles, short descriptions, and hyperlinks to longer articles or Web pages, as well as a linked reference back to the originating site. New content and links in web feeds are updated automatically.

How do I start using web feeds?

First you need a feed reader (also called news reader or feed aggregator), which is a piece of software that checks web feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added to them. There are two types of feed readers:

• Feed readers accessed using a Web browser - lets you catch up with your web feeds from any computer
• Downloadable feed reader applications - lets you store web feeds on your main computer, in the same way that you download your email using Outlook or Thunderbird

How does a feed reader work?

Most feed readers look more or less the same. The often have the following features:

• Subscribe button - used to subscribe to a new web feed, this is done by providing the URL to the web feed
• List of subscribed feeds - a list of feeds you subscribed to
• List of feed items - displays the latest news items in the selected feed

An example of a web based feed reader called "Google Reader":

Feed reader applications

A few of the feed readers available:

Learn Chinese using web feeds

MDBG offers you free web feeds to improve / maintain your Chinese vocabulary, please try them out: MDBG vocabulary feeds.