Feeds

A feed is a raw stream of unformatted, structured information that changes over time. It enables you to easily keep track of a large number of websites without having to visit the site each time; sort of a like a newspaper that can be customized to your liking.

The two types of feeds that are available are RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication and Atom. They’re both based on XML which is a widely used standard for information exchange between applications on the Internet. A feed can be viewed as plain text, but they’re really designed for computer-to-computer communication.

There are two different feeds available at XHTMLed that use RSS 2.0. You can either download a program such as NetNewsWire (Mac OS X) or NewzCrawler (Windows) or you can use one of the growing number of online services like Bloglines.com. The advantage of using a desktop application to read your feeds is that you'll have more bells and whistles, but if you use an online service you’ll have the advantage of being able to access your feed updates from any location while using a web browser or even mobile devices.

If you visit a lot of sites that are updated frequently and a feed is offered, you might want to consider it. Not only will it save you a lot of time by having to visit the site to see if it's been updated, but you can be notified within minutes from when the update is published.