What are site feeds?

[711]

In words of one syllable, please and in non tech. language, what exactly are site feeds? Where do I find them? How do I get them? What do I do with them? Any info gratefully appreciated. Thanks. 711

[fo3nix]

Suppose you read a few websites every day.

Don't you find it annoying to have to open these separate sites every time, just to read each one or see if there's anything new?

Well, a site feed is just a way of getting the content from a website.

So say you read a website, like the BBC news site. Instead of having to see all the BBC logos and other adverts and information, when you just want the news content, you can see the feed, which just gives the content.

Now, lots of websites do this.

You can then use a program called a feed reader or feed aggregator (meaning groups lots of feeds). This lets you see all your feeds at once, so you can read all your websites at the same time.

Does that make sense?

[fo3nix]

Now, the 'feed' name (also called syndication sometimes) is the name for the idea.

The technology that makes this happen is called various things. "RSS" is one name, "atom" is another. You can ignore these, pretty much all the feed readers support everything.

How to get the feeds: in internet explorer 7 and firefox, a little orange box with a signal type icon appears, which you can click. This may just show you it in a raw format, or it may open the feed in your feed reader.

Feed readers are available either as separate programs to run on your computer, or as websites that you can go on. I'll give the address of two of the latter types, that are both good:

http://www.google.com/reader

http://www.bloglines.com

[fo3nix]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm

That's how the BBC explains it.

[711]

Thanks fo3nix, I do get the idea now. But the bottom line of my problem is this. I`ve just started a website, and have submitted it to be included in the Yahoo search engine. On the Submit form, as well as asking for my site URL, it also asks for the URL of a site feed that I`d like to submit. I`m in the dark as to exactly what this is all about. 711.

[fo3nix]

OK.

Creating your own feed is another matter. It depends how you've created your website. If you use a CMS such as Wordpress, it'll create a feed automatically for you.

However, I'd just ignore it. Submitting to search engines does nothing really. The only way to get good search engine listings is to get people to link to your site, by creating a site that people want to visit.

[711]

Thanks again fo3nix. I thing I will take your advice and ignore it. I`ll have to try and find a few sites that will link to mine.