What is a ‘feed’
On the Internet, a feed is a web page that’s designed to be understood by your news aggregator or news reader program. It contains a list of recent stories that are available from a web site. In operation, your news reader program will periodically fetch a feed file, compare it with a previous version that it has stored and give you a summary of any changes.
News feeds vary in how much detail they offer. At a minimum, a feed will contain a title, a short summary and a link to the full story. Some feeds offer more, such as bibleographic info (author name, copyright notice), images, expiration dates, multiple language options, etc. News reader programs are allowed to ignore any of this information if they wish, and servers vary widely in what extras they offer.
How to subscribe
To subscribe to the ASMP feed, you need a news reader program. If you don’t already have one, see below. Once you have one, subscribing is quite simple: right-click one of these links to copy its URL to the clipboard, then paste the URL into the list of sites that your news reader monitors. The correct URL depends on what your news reader requires:
- The RSS 1.0 feed if your software uses a format called RSS 1.0
- The RSS 2.0 feed if it wants a newer format called RSS 2.0
- The Atom feed if it requires the slightly different Atom spec
The information contained in each URL is virtually the same. The differences are how the updating information is structured — tagging rules, size limits, etc. Feel free to left-click any of these URLs to see what’s there. But we should warn you that it’s intended to be easy for a program to understand, not a human.
Where to get news readers
We don’t want to recommend any specific software, because the field is changing fast and any recommendation is sure to go out of date. Besides, we have personally tested only a few of the candidates. However, to get you started in looking for the news reader that fits you best, here are a few names.
AmphetaDesk (Windows, Macintosh, Linux)
BottomFeeder (Windows, Macintosh, Unix and more)
NetNewsWire (Macintosh)
NewzCrawler (Windows)
NewsGator (Microsoft Outlook)
NewsMonster (Mozilla)
Straw (GNOME)
Syndirella (.NET)
Syndication pioneer Dave Winer offers a much longer list of RSS 2 news readers on his RSS at Harvard Law page. An extensive list of Atom readers can be found at the AtomEnabled site. And we have no doubt there are many others.
For more information
There is a rich history of how the several feed formats came to be, and where they might go, at O’Reilly’s XML.com site. RSS, Atom and many other modern data formats are based on XML (the Extensible Markup Language), and O’Reilly is among the best sources for such info.
