The wonderful world of RSS feeds
It's easy to get overwhelmed with information. In just one day, it's likely that you're exposed to more information than you can possibly read, watch, or listen to. And while the Internet certainly can add to the feeling of being overloaded, new tools and services—such as RSS feeds—are available that you can use to help manage the flood of information.
What are RSS feeds?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds—also known as XML feeds, syndicated content, web feeds, or just feeds—refers to the updated content published by a website. An RSS feed is the Internet equivalent of the scrolling readerboard you sometimes see in public areas of big cities, or the scrolling text that appears at the bottom of some television news programs. But instead of someone else programming headlines you might not be interested in, with RSS you can choose the types of headlines that get fed to your reader. When you want to read the entire story, you just click the headline.
Where can I read feeds?
Today, more and more websites are providing RSS feeds, and these feeds can be viewed using many different methods and devices. For example, a single RSS feed could be read in the following ways:
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In the feed reader that comes with your Internet browser.
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In the Feed Headlines Windows Vista Sidebar gadget.
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As a content module or section on a customized website, such as a personalized Live.com or MyMSN webpage.
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In the Windows Live Mail feed reader.
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In the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 feed reader.
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On a phone that has feed reader software and which can connect to the Internet.
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On stand-alone feed aggregator software, such as Onfolio, SharpReader, Feedreader, NewsGator, RSS Bandit, NetNewsWire for Macintosh computers, and many others.
Finding news feeds with a search engine
Many search engines, including Bing, have a feature to find feeds or blogs. For example, if you're interested in finding a feed for top news headlines, it's as simple as clicking a few buttons:
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Open Bing, and then, under Explore, click News.
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Under Resources, click rss.
The Bing News feed opens in your browser:
An example RSS feed displayed in Internet Explorer 8
If you don’t have a feed reader in your browser, this feed will look like a bunch of code. Internet Explorer 8 includes an RSS Feed reader. For more information about Internet Explorer 8 and to download the software for free, go to the Internet Explorer 8
website online.
Subscribe to a feed
Now that you've found the top news headlines feed, you'll want to subscribe to it. The following steps assume you are using Internet Explorer 8 as your feed reader.
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In Internet Explorer 8, click the
Subscribe to this Feed button
.
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Click Subscribe to use the default name and storage location for this feed subscription. If you want to change the name and storage location, type a name for the feed and select a folder to create the feed subscription in. If you do not have any folders for RSS feeds, click New Folder to create a folder.
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To view your feeds, click the
Favorites Center button
, and then click
Feeds.
After you subscribe to a feed, it will be added to your web browser's or feed reader's list of feeds. In Internet Explorer 8, the feed title's font appears bold when updated content is available from that feed.
Once you subscribe to a feed, Internet Explorer provides the Common Feed
List to other programs. This means that those feeds will be automatically available in other programs, like Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail, or the Feed Headlines Windows Vista Sidebar gadget.
View a feed in Windows Sidebar
You can use the Feed Headlines gadget in Windows Vista to view feeds you've subscribed to in Internet Explorer right on your desktop. The Feed Headlines gadget can display headlines from all feeds you've subscribed to, or just the ones you specify.
To view a feed with Feed Headlines
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Öffnen Sie die Windows-Sidebar, indem Sie auf die Schaltfläche Start
klicken, auf Alle Programme klicken, auf Zubehör klicken und dann auf Windows-Sidebar klicken.
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Point to Feed Headlines, click
the
Options button
, and then choose a feed from the
Display this feed list. For example, if you only wanted to view MSBNC Headline feeds that you subscribed to, you would choose only that feed. Click
OK.
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Click a headline to read an introduction of the story, and then click the headline in the expanded feed window to open the story in a web browser.
The Feed Headlines Sidebar gadget
Make it yours
Feeds can help you manage the information on the Internet that you're interested in. Now, instead of visiting five or ten webpages, you can see everything in one place.
And that might give you a little extra time to read the newspaper that’s sitting on the porch.
