A Consuming Experience: introduction

Showing posts with label introduction. Show all posts

Monday, 13 July 2009

Using feeds: introduction / guide for absolute beginners 1

This is a primer on how to use feeds / newsfeeds. I’ve done detailed posts on feeds before; this is just a brief intro for the intelligent non-techie, based on helping a friend get started using feeds, as there seems to be more non-geek interest in it now. Feeds finally going mainstream?

This first post (of a series) is a basic overview of feeds. Later posts will be more tutorial like, and will cover step by step how to use and subscribe to feeds (using the free Google Reader), including troubleshooting tips - all from the viewpoint of a feed user (rather than feed publisher, which was my previous main focus).

What are feeds or RSS feeds, what use are they?

Instead of having to go round manually checking your fave news websites or blogs regularly for added or updated content, just fetch their content to you in one place, and check that. Examples:
1. News or press releases
2. Publications – papers or reports issued
3. Forthcoming events
4. What’s New page (combining all the above, perhaps)
5. Blog posts.
Feeds are much quicker to use, not just because you don’t have to visit multiple websites anymore, but because (at least on Google Reader) you can skim through all the latest “headlines” at once, on one page (rather than opening each folder individually). Then, you just open the ones you’re interested in reading further. Potentially feeds are a real time saver.

Analogy: imagine your email has folders for different types of emails, and all incoming emails get “filed” into the appropriate folders automatically on arrival. But one “folder” called “All new mail” has all recent email for all folders; you just look at that one folder to skim the subject lines of all new emails, without having to file any emails manually. You can still look at folders one by one if you like, or search across all folders; the “All new mail” folder (“All items” in Google Reader) is just a convenient way to see what’s new fast, at a glance.
You fetch (subscribe to) the content you want via feeds / newsfeeds / RSS feeds / Atom feeds (people use those words interchangeably to stand for the same thing).
Some feeds are full (a complete copy of the substantive content on the equivalent webpage), some are partial (only an excerpt, and you have to click through to the source website if you want to read the full item). Most feed users prefer sites to offer full feeds, as it’s more convenient for the user. (On ACE I offer the option of full feeds.)
Software that regularly fetches the content for you and aggregates it all in one place is called a feed reader / news reader / aggregator. The reader can be software on your computer, or it can be on the Web (where you can login to it from any computer).
You can also use feeds not just to track new publications, but also to get alerts or updates on topics you’re interested in, right in your feed reader - e.g. mentions of a particular phrase in Google News or on websites or blog posts. Including from sites you don’t subscribe to.

Those are really feeds for the results of periodic searches. (To set one up - just do the search, and subscribe to the search results.)

How do I subscribe to feeds?

Sign up for a feed reader, or download and install one (more info on feed readers). Most are free.
Add the feeds you want to your reader (how to subscribe to feeds).

I’ll be doing a separate post later on the basics of exactly how to set up and use feeds on Google Reader, ie a step by step tutorial – look out for that if you want to learn more.

But trying to subscribe for a feed doesn’t work!

Too many sites are awful in terms of their support for feed and feed use. Even sites that provide feeds don’t always (and they should) provide them in such a way that feed readers can “get” the feeds automatically from knowing the website’s main web address (URL).

This is a source of frustration for many new users of feeds. I’ll cover how to troubleshoot and work around feed subscription problems in a future post. (Update: link to that post added.)

What if the site or page I want to subscribe to doesn’t provide a feed?

There are ways to get updates of changes to webpages with no associated feeds.

Again, I’ll be covering a workaround in a future post.

But I want more info now!!

The curious or keen may if they wish read my detailed introduction to feeds.

Sunday, 29 June 2008

Feeds basics 101: using Feedburner - why, how, & more ways to publicise your blog (part 3)

3. How to use Feedburner

UPDATE: for the impatient, here are 12 quick steps to take to use Feedburner for your blog; you can refer to this post as a reference guide.

This part 3 is an introductory guide, part review part practical tutorial, to the fab service Feedburner, focusing mainly on Blogger users but with info of interest to users of other blogging platforms too - with a basic intro to Feedburner, an overview of its services and howtos and tips on using Feedburner and getting the most out of it. (In part 1 of this introductory feeds basics 101 series I covered the basics about feeds, and in part 2 how to activate and publicise (in a basic way) your blog feed. I know this part 3 is rather behind!)

This part 3 blog post is mainly aimed at those who already know what feeds are, e.g. through reading parts 1 and 2 (although I do include a summary below).

What's Feedburner?

Feedburner is a superb service for doing all sorts of clever things with feeds, particularly tracking statistics - notably, the number of people who "subscribe" to your blog. That all sounds a bit vague but bear with me, you'll see what I mean later.

Most of Feedburner's services are currently free, and they've been owned since mid-2007 by Google, who have made even more Feedburner features free. (Full disclosure: they asked me to become a Feedburner Community Expert (unpaid volunteer in their Feedburner help group) a couple of months ago, but I drafted most of this post well before then, as I've been a Feedburner fan ever since I learned about their service.)

My personal view is, if you have a feed, you really should use Feedburner - it just keeps on getting better and better, rolling out more and more features and enhancements, and they were doing that even before the Google acquisition. I've not heard of any similar service that competes with it, but frankly even if there was one I'd still stick with Feedburner, myself.

Recap / summary on feeds generally

Just to recap on web feeds generally (particularly for readers who haven't read parts 1 and 2).

You decide you want to "syndicate" your blog or news site - i.e. to publish your blog posts or stories / articles in such a way that people won't have to keep visiting your blog or site to check for updates, but can just "subscribe" to your site's news feed or web feed.

That way, your content is "fed" to them (along with updates from any other blogs and news sites they subscribe to), so that they can view all the new content from all the sources they've subscribed to, pretty much as it comes out, but from one single place that's convenient for the user - whether that's their newsfeed reader or "feed aggregator" software on their computer, or alternatively a Website which specialises in collecting feeds from different blogs and news sites and pulling them together into one Webpage that they can read online. People can even offer feeds by email. (Feeds can be opened in browsers too, and in most modern browsers will display fine, but trying to go to a feed URL in earlier browsers produces a bunch of code which might cause a bit of a shock to the system.)

All this is possible by using a standard format known as RSS (hence the term "RSS feeds"). Another commonly used standard for newsfeeds is Atom, but it doesn't seem as well known to the general populace, and in fact "RSS feed" is often used to mean "newsfeed" generally.

To produce a feed, you need to set things up with your blogging software (such as WordPress or Blogger) so that whenever you publish a new post, your blogging software will update your feed according to how you've set it up on your blogging platform - i.e. it automatically creates a separate version of your changed main blog page as a separate feed file, but reformatted into the appropriate form for feeds such as Atom or RSS (or both, in the case of Blogger and other blogging platforms which produce more than one feed file behind the scenes).

That feed could contain your latest 5 posts, your latest 10 posts etc; and it could contain the full text of your posts, or just a summary - it depends on how you've set the syndication feed up behind the scenes with your blogging software (with Blogger, it's the Settings, Site Feed bit of the Dashboard; with WordPress, go to Settings on the right, then the Reading sub-tab).

Now if you're happy to stick with the basic feed that's produced natively by your blogging platform, all you need to do is to switch on or enable your feed, tweak its basic settings, and publicise its Web address or URL (which I covered in more detail in part 2 ).

But if you want your feed to be more useful and user-friendly both for you and your subscribers, you really should consider using Feedburner. Those who've signed up for the free Google Webmaster Central service for webmasters can get through it figures for who's subscribed to their feed via Google services like Google Reader and the personalised Google homepage iGoogle; but if you want stats for subscribers who use other feedreader services like Bloglines or Newsgator, Feedburner is the best way to get the subscriber numbers all in one place. And it has other uses too, as I'll come to.

Why use Feedburner?

In terms of pros and cons, there are tons of benefits and advantages you can get from using Feedburner, and no disadvantages that I can see, given that it's free. In my experience their staff have always been amazingly smart, knowledgeable, friendly, funny and helpful, unlike some other Web 2.0 services I could name, but politely won't - I sure hope getting together with Google won't change them (I love their sense of humour, you can see it on their various website pages and even on your account pages when you log in). [Note: I drafted that paragraph before I was asked to become a Feedburner Community Expert, and no I hadn't shown it to anyone!]

As I said before, to me it's a total no brainer. Feedburner give their own overview plus specific reasons why bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers should use their service. For instance Feedburner offers a feature called "SmartFeed" which provides your feed in whatever format, RSS or Atom, a user's feed reader can handle.

In my view, the key advantages of Feedburner are these:

traffic analysis / analytics for your feed - feed subscriber and usage statistics / metrics; you can even use Feedburner to track visitors to your blog or site, not just your feed, and get some useful info on most popular / top pages. etc
user-friendliness through browser-friendliness and reader-friendliness
providing email subscriptions to your blog - which are also included in your statistics
publicising your blog - loads of tools to help here
Feedflare to enhance your feed and blog both (I'll explain later)
future possibility of making money through ads in your Feedburner feeds.

Browser-friendliness

As mentioned in part 1, given the way that feed icons / links are commonly shown on Webpages, if a visitor is not familiar with feeds (which will be most non-techies), then they're liable to leftclick on the link, which opens up the feed in their browser - and in many browsers feed files will just look like gobbledygook, which some may find confusing, scary or just annoying.

Feedburner feeds have a feature called "Browser-friendly", which means that if a user opens the feed link in their browser (even old browsers), it provides a much nicer view, almost like a normal webpage, and it furthermore offers the user the chance to easily subscribe to the feed via the main popular feed readers or aggregators like Newsgator, My Yahoo, iGoogle homepage or Google Reader etc (see the section outlined in red in the pic below, which Feedburner adds to the view of your feed in a browser).

Stats - how to track users who download your feed

Most bloggers like looking at their statistics. Many have hit counters to see how many visitors they've had and where they came from, etc (I use Statcounter, and also Google Analytics). So, for fans of web analytics, Feedburner is essential as most blogging platforms don't provide a built-in way to track hits to their native feeds.

A hit counter, which you can add to your blog, will tot up visits to your blog web pages (including individual post or item pages if it's been set up that way). But it won't track how many people have downloaded your feed, or how many have clicked on items in your feed to go to the original post's web page. Feedburner will keep count of hits to your feed, as long as the user has accessed your feed via a Feedburner feed URL (instead of the native feed URL).

So, when you login to Feedburner you can see how many people have subscribed to your Feedburner feed (the figure can vary a lot as it goes by the number of times feed readers have fetched your feed, not the absolute number of people who've added your feed to their reader), and even what particular items they've clicked on, etc.

If people subscribe direct to your blog's native feed (e.g. in Blogger the http://yoururl/atom.xml or http://yoururl.com/feeds/posts/default feed URL), you didn't use to be able to track that, so you had no way of knowing how many direct subscribers you had. However, if you use Blogger, by redirecting your native Blogger feed to Feedburner as mentioned in part 2, you can now track all your subscribers - even those who try to subscribe to the direct atom.xml etc address will be redirected to your Feedburner feed. (With other blogging platforms, I'm not sure how you can track users who subscribe to your blog's native feed direct rather than your Feedburner feed.)

Also, if you wish you can use Feedburner to track visitors to your underlying blog or website, not just number of feed subscribers.

Offer your readers e-mail subscriptions

With Feedburner, you can even allow people to get email subscriptions to your feed, i.e. to receive your new posts by ordinary email, if you wish - with a choice of email subs via Feedblitz (see my posts on Feedblitz), or via Feedburner themselves, or Rmail - and Feedburner will track those subs too. Feedblitz is currently more powerful e.g. sending subscribers emails only weekly instead of daily, if you prefer.

More flexibility to allow users to consume their media in whatever way they choose is always a good thing, in my book. And in fact this very blog has a few subscribers who subscribe to its feed via email (about 8% subscribe via Feedblitz).

Gimme Feedburner - how do you get a Feedburner feed, i.e. burn your feed, anyway?

To use Feedburner you "burn" your feed. This involves giving Feedburner your feed URL, and they will then take your original feed and produce a new special Feedburner feed out of it, with its own unique web address or URL. Your original source feed still exists and is left untouched. In other words:

Your "burn" your feed by giving Feedburner your feed URL (if you don't know your feed URL it may be able to figure it out from your blog URL).
It then takes your feed and transforms it into a different, more useful kind of feed, a special Feedburner feed with a different unique URL of its own (http://feeds.feedburner.com/somethingorother-uniquetoyou), which is served out of Feedburner's own servers.
You then note down your Feedburner feed URL and make use of the URL in various ways e.g. publicise it on your blog.

To repeat, you should thereafter, if you want to get the benefits of Feedburner, just give out as your feed URL the URL of your burned Feedburner feed (which will be something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOURBLOGNAME), instead of the URL of your basic Blogger or other blog feed. If you have a Blogger blog you can get it to automatically redirect to your Feedburner feed as mentioned above.

I repeat, your original blog feed still exists, and is still necessary, as it's what the Feedburner feed is based on - they just convert it to a new whizzy (separate) feed which you can then deploy. So you mustn't turn off the outputting of your blog's native feed, unless of course you deliberately want to for privacy etc reasons. In which case you probably won't be wanting to burn a Feedburner feed anyway.

How to burn your feed - step by step

If you prefer videos watch the official Feedburner video (a little out of date now as they've added to their features, but basically still good) for a howto on burning your feed, but it's really very straightforward.

Here's a step by step:

On the Feedburner front page, enter your feed URL or, if you don't know it, blog or site URL in the box (how to find out your feed URL for MySpace, note: for self-hosted WordPress blogs it's best to just use the FeedSmith plugin) - you can leave out the "http://":
Then, making sure "I am a podcaster" is not ticked (unless of course you are a podcaster), hit Next. (If you want to podcast your feed, see this introduction to podcasting).
Feedburner will "auto-discover" your feed, and give you a choice of feeds based on your blog's auto-discovery settings - some blogging software like Blogger and WordPress will produce both Atom and RSS versions (outlined in red below).

If it's available pick Atom, then hit Next (but don't worry if RSS is the only option):
You'll see something like this:

Feed address: if you don't like their suggested feed address, you can change the ending of the Feedburner feed address, the bit that's in the text box outlined in red above (blogspot/CWhy in the pic above) to a name of your own choice - if it's not already taken. For instance, my main Feedburner feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ConsumingExperience. (I also have other feeds, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ConsumingExperienceFull for my full feed, for instance). You can even change the ending via Edit Feed Details after you're logged in in future, though I wouldn't recommend it once you've had subscribers who are using the original feed URL.

Create an account: self-explanatory, if you're new to Feedburner you have to create an account with them to access your stats etc later.

Then click "Activate Feed", and that's it.

The feed URL they've given or you've chosen, http://feeds.feedburner.com/WHATEVER, is now the address or URL of your crisply burned new Feedburner feed, and as mentioned above you can redirect Blogger to that feed address (and should, if you're using Blogger), add the Feedburner URL link to your sidebar, etc etc, as you wish. So make a note of that feed URL.
Now you'll see something like this, just read it and click Next:
You may as well click Next and then tick all the boxes shown below (clickthroughs for stats, item enclosure downloads for podcast downloads, and Feedburner Stats Pro, currently - Feedburner Pro is now mostly free thanks to Google, so you've nothing to lose):
Then click Next, and you'll see lots of helpful options from Feedburner to help you redirect your blog feed to your new Feedburner feed, add a chicklet to your blog sidebar and offer blog updates via email - not just for Blogger but also for users of TypePad, WordPress, and MySpace; click the suggestions for your own blogging software and try 'em out (particularly redirection and offering email updates):
If you've already got a Feedburner account, you can login and burn a new feed via your My Feeds page using the box at the bottom of your list of feeds. Whatever you prefer, really. Obviously, in that case it won't ask you to create a Feedburner account:

What next? How to set up Feedburner options

There are many settings relating to what useful things Feedburner can do for you, grouped under the Analyze, Optimize, Publicize etc tabs.

One could write a whole book just on the many and varied possible uses of Feedburner feeds (and I would if someone were to want to commission one, ahem!), but I'll just touch on a few key features here and make some initial suggestions to get you started, if you have no particular preferences (you can always change them later, and should, to whatever suits your own situation best).

So, login to Feedburner, and in My Feeds click the name of the feed you want to tinker with.

Check out the various options and tabs. They include ways to publicise and optimise your feed, and maybe even make money from it too.

I'll walk you through the tabs now.

Analyze tab - statistics

This is the section where you can see how many (though not which) people subscribe to your Feedburner feed, and what readers they use, etc. The stats are pretty self-explanatory and comprehensive. You can find more detailed help on the Analyze tab. Some tips:

Feedburner Stats Pro - first thing, under Services, bottom left, you should go to Feedburner Stats Pro and tick all the empty boxes (if you tick "Exclude visits from this computer" too, then your own visits to your own site won't be counted as hits, which will provide you with more accurate statistics should you choose to use that Feedburner tracking service). That'll get Feedburner to track more things, which again are self-explanatory.

Now back to the top of the Analyze tab page.

Feed stats show subscribers, views and click throughs from your feed, both total and for individual posts. You can see info on your subscribers - numbers and what feed readers or aggregators they use, including email subs, or browsers, and even which search engines' bots have fetched your feed. Note that the "Subscribers" stats are for the number of times that particular Feedburner feed has been checked or fetched by readers/aggregators within the last day, 7 days or other period you select from the dropdown - it's not the same as exactly how many humans have subscribed to your blog, though it should give you a good idea of that number as it's based on the number of times your feed's been requested in a 24-hour period

"Live hits" show what time and where your last 25 "live hits" i.e. hits to your feed were, feed readers used (user agent), and countries of origin - i.e. when someone loads your feed into their reader or browser or a bot requests your feed.

"Item use" is info on which were the most popular items viewed by your subscribers and the number of click throughs on them.

Site stats are available free, as well as feed stats (see the Feedburner site stats overview and FAQ). If you activate site stats (as explained below), Feedburner will give you helpful statistics on the visits to the most popular individual post or item webpages on your blog or site, not just your feed (with trends e.g. up 10% or down 3% etc) as well as overall figures on visits and page views. It also shows you the top 20 incoming traffic sources i.e. where visitors to your blog came from (plus top search engine sources, top search terms as well as top referring domains linking to your site), and even top 10 outgoing links clicked and how many clicks each had. There's also info on visitors like numbers, browsers used, top cities they came from, even top languages, operating systems and screen resolutions, all presented in a very user-friendly way.

And you can of course have site stats from Feedburner in addition to your normal blog traffic hit counters or trackers if you wish. So it's up to you whether you want to use Feedburner site stats, or alternative web analytics services provided by e.g. Google Analytics (which is to be integrated properly with Blogger soon - Google had acquired Measure Map in 2006), or Statcounter, etc.

To activate site stats, scroll to the bottom of the Analyze tab - it's in the Feedburner Stats PRO section (which you'll have activated if you followed my suggestions earlier after burning your feed), tick the boxes if you haven't already and get the code to paste in your blog template following the instructions for your blogging software. If you already have FeedFlare (covered below), just make sure that the "For my site, track" box for Visitors etc is ticked and Save, as the FeedFlare code will do double duty so you don't need to add any extra code to your blog.

I'll come to Headline Animator later.

Optimize tab

You can get detailed help on the Optimize tab. Here are the key points.

Make sure BrowserFriendly is ticked (it should be anyway), otherwise people who try to open your feed URL in some browsers will get a horrid scary offputting screen. Click it and check the options, make sure all Appearance Options are ticked. Click "More subscription options" and tick the boxes there if you want to allow your visitors to subscribe via more services than the standard ones already ticked. I won't go into Content options here, you can just leave it as the default. Don't forget to Save!
SmartCast is just for podcasters, ignore it if you're not podcasting (intro to podcasting); similarly Tickerize is for financial feeds/podcasts.
SmartFeed - make sure this is ticked and active. As mentioned above that makes your feed work with all kinds of readers. It doesn't matter whether your blogging platform produces your feed in RSS or Atom format - with SmartFeed turned on, Feedburner cleverly generates a feed in whatever format the reader prefers, so you don't need to worry about any standards wars, just have a single Feedburner feed and that's it. But don't touch Convert Format Burner unless you know what it's for and it's deliberate!
FeedFlare - I'll cover this later.
Link Splicer, Photo Splicer and Geotag are self-explanatory, and optional - you can automatically add your latest del.icio.us or other social bookmarking links or your photos from Flickr, Buzznet or Webshots to your feeds, even if they're not added to your blog's Webpages. Just remember to click Activate when done.
Feed Image Burner - self-explanatory, you can add your own pic or logo to your feed (see mine, top right when you click this ACE feed link). By default that pic will be the Feedburner logo, unless you choose your own custom image URL (upload your own pic to a free file hosting service like Fileden, then enter the resulting link to the uploaded file in Feed Image Burner). One gotcha - if you choose Creative Commons (see later), and an image like the Feedburner logo or your own image, the latter will override and you won't see a CC image in your feed. There can be only one. (Image in your feed, that is. Sorry, Highlander reference!)
Title/Description Burner - again self-explanatory, to make your feed title etc more descriptive if your native source feed isn't good enough - check it out to see the options.
Convert Format Burner - usually leave this to the default.
Summary Burner - remember, your blogging platform puts out a feed, and you then give that feed URL to Feedburner to process it further. If you use the summary burner, Feedburner takes your original blog feed and then cuts it down according to your settings, so that those subscribing to your Feedburner feed URL will only get the cut down version. I've previously discussed in more detail how to use summary burner. You could also set your feed to output only a summary at the source feed end (with WordPress it's in the Settings, Reading tab), but of course that means that Feedburner will never get the full feed to work with. If you want to have only one feed, my personal view is that a full feed (not summary) is best, but it's your choice.
Event Feed - leave this alone! When this feature was first introduced, I thought that if you activated it and then added events from upcoming.org etc to your blog, this option would add those events to your feed too. Not so - if you try that even as a test, you may get an empty feed. This option is for use only when you burn a feed that's from a special, calendar or events-type site, not for a "normal" site like a blog. However, as Feedburner suggest, you can use this to burn an event feed, then use BuzzBoost (see later) to get code to paste in your site in order to display the events in date order on your blog.
Amazon ID Burner is also self-explanatory, useful if you're an Amazon Associate and want to make money from your feed.

Publicize tab - promoting your feed

I strongly recommend that you check out the options here carefully. You can get more help on the Publicize tab. Just a few pointers:

Headline Animator - I just love this feature, it's one of the best things about a Feedburner feed, to me: you can get an animated graphic (strictly, a GIF file on Feedburner's servers) to put in your email signature, message board signature, or on Websites etc. I don't how Feedburner do it, but Headline Animator lets you create an animated banner which automatically cycles through the headlines of your last 5 (max) blog posts, showing each headline for a second or two - which is great as a teaser for people viewing it, hopefully interesting them enough to click on it and read your full blog posts (when people click the banner, it will take them to your blog URL).

This is what mine looks like, it's their default look. You can include a "Grab this" link so people can display your banner on their site or blog if they wish):
↑ Grab this Headline Animator

You can even customise it a bit (but note you can't have one look for email, one for forums etc, you'll just get one version of the graphic, so whatever changes you make will follow through for all of them - unless you burn a separate feed for each "look", of course - see below on burning multiple feeds - and use the code from different ones for different purposes).

You can choose from a number of themes e.g. mine is Classic, or customise it quite a lot, even provide your own background image (as a GIF only, of the size you want your banner to be, which must be already uploaded on the Web - I tried to customise it once but just couldn't get it to look OK in terms of positioning and text size etc, this bit isn't very easy for non-artistics types like me!). After you're happy with your banner, click Activate, and you'll see a preview of your banner, with "Add to MySpace, TypePad" etc under it. Just click the dropdown and a new window pops up with the code for your platform, including Blogger and WordPress, which you can copy and paste into your template or website to display the banner.

The headline animator stats section under the Analyze tab shows how many views of your animator there have been, and how many click throughs to your blog posts via it.

Email sigs. You can even use your Feedburner animated banner as your email signature, if you have HTML emails. What a great way to show off your blog posts to recipients of your emails. It includes a nice "Subscribe now" link for the image too.

To get this animated graphic for your email sig, when you pick a Headline Animator theme (which actually doesn't have to be "Email signature" and click Activate, you'll see an "Add to MySpace etc" dropdown - pick "Email signature" from the list and it pops up a window with code and step by step instructions for Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook Express and Outlook 2003, Yahoo! Mail, and workarounds for Gmail and AppleMail. Whew!

Forum, bulletin board or messageboard sigs. Here's another tip. You know how lots of message boards let you have an image in your profile signature? Well you can have your headline animator banner in your forum sigs too, to help publicise your blog. I do - see e.g. this post in the old Feedburner forums for instance. Just grab your headline animator code, and look for the URL for the animated gif which will end in .gif - mine is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ConsumingExperience.1.gif for example, and use that as the image URL. The BBCode for that, which most forums use, is something like this (just change YOURBLOGURL.com to your own blog or site's URL, and change "http://feeds.feedburner.com/ConsumingExperienceFull.1.gif" URL to point to your own headline animator's URL, then paste it into the Signature box of your forum profile):
[url=http://YOURBLOGURL.com][img]http://feeds.feedburner.com/ConsumingExperienceFull.1.gif[/img][/url]

BuzzBoost - this lets people display snippets from your Feedburner feed on a Web page, and is mostly self-explanatory (see the Buzzboost overview). Set your options, then Activate to get some Javascript code you can paste in your blog template or any website in order to display your feed on your blog or that website. It's a bit recursive if you paste it into the same blog whose feed you've just burned, of course, but the main point is that you can use the code in other blogs or sites to help publicise your blog, e.g. if you have more than one blog you could show the feeds from blog A in the sidebar of blog B.

You can customise BuzzBoost too, in terms of number of posts to display etc, and also customise how the Webpage snippet looks through CSS styling.
SpringWidgets - very cool, but a bit fiddly as you have to make a logo for your widget of exactly the right size etc, and I'm hopeless at image twiddling myself, cropping is my limit! I had a play with SpringWidgets when they first came out a year or so ago. I even had one in my sidebar for a while but removed it for some reason.

I never got round to blogging about SpringWidgets at the time, but basically you can make a free widget to display your blog content via your feed, a bit like BuzzBoost. What's unique about SpringWidgets is that people can very easily grab that widget to display your content on their computer desktop or on MySpace, message boards, their own website or blog, just by clicking the icon.

If you want a SpringWidget for your own blog I suggest you use SpringWidgets' own widget maker - it's a lot easier to configure, e.g. if you only have a narrow sidebar you can change the size there and then, etc (that's what they mean by "widget embed size") - it's not often I say something's easier than Feedburner, but this is! Anyway here's one I just whipped up for this blog so you can see what it looks like:

Get this widget!

Email subscriptions - activate this to offer your readers the ability to subscribe to your posts by email, i.e. they'll receive email updates with the text of your posts in them (whether full posts or excerpts only etc will depend on your Summary Burner settings, mentioned above). You'll get some code to paste into your blog or site's template, e.g. in the sidebar (see mine), where someone can fill in their email address to subscribe - it's even easier to add the subscription form to TypePad or Blogger. Here's how to add the email subscription form for MySpace and WordPress (note: if you don't see Presentation - Widgets, try Design, Widgets, add a Text widget, Edit it, put the code in the bigger box and you can add a title like "Subscribe to feed" in the upper box) - see WordPress.com's own write-up.

At present you can provide email subscriptions via 3 services: Feedblitz, Feedburner's own email subscription system or, though I've not tried that, Rmail. Feedblitz probably offers the most power and flexibility currently (see my early Feedblitz write-up) - e.g. with Feedburner's own system you can only get emails sent to your subscribers once a day within a delivery window you select; with Feedblitz you can have weekly delivery, etc, but you'd need to sign up for a separate account with Feedblitz. I won't go into the details here, they're mostly intuitive, but obviously if you use Feedburner the options will be in Feedburner, whereas if you use Feedblitz you'll have to login to Feedblitz to tweak your settings (see the Feedblitz FAQs). I use Feedblitz for ACE.
Pingshot - tells various feed/web services when your feed is updated so they can index your updated content. I'd tick everything (notably Ping-O-Matic, which itself pings lots of other services including Newsgator, and Google Blog Search - much better than manually pinging BlogSearch!). You're allowed to add 5 more services to ping, so make full use of that and Add them before saving/activating - no point adding those which PingOMatic already pings, in my view, so probably not Icerocket, BlogDigger, Syndic8, Moreover, but if you want to why not ping Weblogs.com direct for luck (though Blogger does that already), and I'd add Alexa, Snap and Tailrank too, but it's up to you.
Feedcount - get a graphic to show off your Feedburner feed's current subscriber circulation (regularly updated) by pasting the code provided into your blog template (or directly installing the widget if you use Movable Type or New Blogger - just select from the dropdown). I don't have one because I offer several feeds (full, excerpts and headlines only, see below) and it's not possible to merge their stats into one number yet, so the figures may be confusing.
Chicklet Chooser - this is absolutely vital, in my view. Here, you can get code for an icon (chicklet) to add to your blog (usually the sidebar) which visitors to your blog can click in order to subscribe to your blog's Feedburner feed. I suggest you click one of the top two orange squares (I prefer the second, personally - more subtle). You could pick one of the custom icons but that narrows subscribers down to only the service picked (e.g. Google or Yahoo); or you can choose plain text if you prefer that to an icon (bottom option).

Once you've picked the look, copy and paste the code given into your template or, if you use Movable Type or New Blogger, you can install the widget direct to your blog. Here's how to add chicklet for TypePad, add a chicklet to WordPress (note: if you don't see Presentation - Widgets, try Design, Widgets, add a Text widget, Edit it, put the code in the bigger box and you can add a title like "Subscribe to feed" in the upper box), or add a chicklet to MySpace.

Tip: no reason why you can't have both the orange square icon and a My Yahoo button or whatever. Just click the one you want, get the code for it, and paste it in your template. Then click the other one, get the code for it, and add it elsewhere in your template.
Awareness API - ignore this unless you're a developer in which case you don't need to read this post!
Creative Commons - I won't go into CC here. Even if you want to use a Creative Commons licence for your feed (I do on mine), note that if you use the Feedburner icon (or your own Feed image burner icon) it will overwrite the CC icon, so it may be pointless ticking "Use the "Some Rights Reserved" image as my feed's logo".
Password Protector - if you want to be exclusive and only let select people subscribe to your Feedburner feed, activate this and enter a username/password combo (again there's only one combo). Give the combo to select few, so they can use it to view your feed. No one should be able to see your Feedburner feed without that info.

But remember, Feedburner processes the original feed from your blog or site. If a nosy parker can work out the URL of your blog's native feed, they can read that source feed anyway (unless you've password protected the original source feed, or protected specific posts, or you've redirected the source feed to the Feedburner URL) - it's only the Feedburner feed they won't be able to read. So a Feedburner password will only work if you're not using a well known blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress.com where the base feed URL can easily be guessed from the blog URL (e.g. for a Blogspot blog it'll just be http://blogurl.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default) - or, if you're using Blogger etc, unless you keep even the blog URL secret except from the select few. (If you turned off the native source feed altogether that won't help as Feedburner wouldn't then be able to produce anything - nothing in nothing out.)
NoIndex - if you want your feed to be private, activate this so that it won't get indexed by the search engines (the Feedburner feed won't then, anyway - you still have to make sure your source feed isn't indexed). You probably also want to tick the box that stops the Feedburner feed from being used with Yahoo Pipes. (If you don't know what Yahoo Pipes are and want to keep your feed private, best tick it and activate.)

Monetize tab - make money with ads

Just to clarify, Feedburner lets you add ads in two ways:

to your feed, and
on your blog's website.

Ads in your feed have been via the Feedburner Ad Network (the FAN) - see Google help on FAN and FAQs. They've only let a limited number of publishers join FAN. But feed ads will soon be available via Google's Adsense (which any blogger can sign up for, with your Google Account if you already have one).

Ads on your blog via Feedburner are AdSense ads displayed using Feedflare (covered below). If you're already using AdSense direct on Blogger (or even if you aren't), I suggest that's the easiest way, rather than using Feedflare. For non-Blogger bloggers, you might want to consider using Feedflare Adsense ads. Remember, this displays ads on your blog webpages using Feedflare, it does not show any ads in your feed.

See the official help on the Monetize tab.

Troubleshootize tab

Again I'm not going into this, let's hope you won't need to use it!

FeedFlare (in Optimise tab)

FeedFlare deserves a section of its own. This is a very clever tool, and it has multiple uses.

Bloggers often enhance their blog with social media links e.g. via AddThis, to encourage readers to tag posts or share posts on social bookmarking sites and the like (such as Facebook, Del.icio.us, Digg) and thus increase visitors, or links to enable users to forward a post by email to a friend. But those links show only on the blog webpages, to people who visit your blog site on the Web. Feed subscribers don't get them because they only get your feed, they don't need to visit your blog pages via the Web.

With FeedFlare, you can enhance your feed similarly by adding clickable links of that kind to your feed (they'll appear at the end of each post in your feed). As Feedburner put it in the FeedFlare overview & FAQ, "FeedFlare changes the dynamic of how users interact with an RSS feed. Rather than just read content from your [Feedburner] feed, subscribers can now take direct actions, such as being able to forward or save an item [or even post a comment or read the comments, for Blogger and self-hosted WordPress blogs]. With a few clicks, publishers can include a whole slew of services. And FeedBurner's open API allows any Web service to create links that publishers can attach to their feeds, making this a fully extensible and customizable solution."

Activating FeedFlare. To use FeedFlare, just go to the FeedFlare section of Optimize, tick the items you want for your feed under the "Feed" column and Activate at the bottom. Each item if you click it has a brief explanation of what it's for. I'd recommend as a minimum ticking Email This, Comments Count, Save to del.icio.us, Digg This! Share on Facebook and Stumble It! but it's up to you. (Tip for Blogger users: do not add the "Email The Author" Feedflare, as Blogger haven't got that working properly and the email will only go into a black hole at Blogger.com rather than going to you. There's a workaround (scroll to the end) but it's really not very satisfactory as it'll display your email address in places you may not want it shown, in place of your name. I hope the Feedburner team will liaise with Team Blogger to sort this out - add a field to the Blogger profile where you can insert your email address for this purpose, ideally.)

Adding other FeedFlares. See the "Personal FeedFlare" section? This lets you add extra FeedFlares created by users outside of Feedburner. Just paste the URL of the FeedFlare in the box and click Add New Flare. I've added ones for Slashdot, Reddit and Twitter for instance (not that ACE has ever been Slashdotted, but that link can't hurt!).

How do you get the URLs of the extra FeedFlares you want to add? You can write your own, if you're a coder, or check out the FeedFlares in the Feedburner FeedFlare catalog or “101 FeedFlare Ideas”.

Changing the order. You can change the order of the FeedFlare items you add, whether provided by Feedburner or others - scroll towards the end of the FeedFlare page, and just move the items around with your mouse to the desired locations.

FeedFlare for your blog. You can also use FeedFlare to enhance your site, i.e. the webpages of your blog, not just your feed.

That's what the "Site" column on the FeedFlare page is for. If you want a social bookmarking link or "Save to delicious" link to show up on your blog webpages (not just your feed), tick the appropriate item here before saving and activating. So for many of these links, FeedFlare is a viable alternative to adding the code for the links manually (e.g. the Delicious Tagometer) or using something like AddThis. I don't have the Save to del.icio.us FeedFlare ticked in the Site myself column, because I already have the Tagometer - but I do tick it under Feed. Similarly I don't need to tick the Email This or Comments Count under Site as I've already got those in my Blogger blog, but if you don't you might want to.

One more step to get the FeedFlare items to show up on your blog webpages - get the FeedFlare HTML code and add it to your template. Scroll to the end of the FeedFlare page and pick your blogging software (Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, WordPress or other) to get step by step instructions on how to add the code to your blog template.

In addition, if you add the Feed Flare code to your site, then as mentioned under Site stats above it does double duty by also tracking visitors to your blog's webpages (not just the feed).

The only disadvantage I can see for FeedFlare (compared with say AddThis) is that the social bookmarking etc links shown on your webpages are text-only links, not eye-catching icons. It would be nice if they made them clickable graphics but I suspect that'll be further down the line.

Promoting and publicizing your feed - autodiscovery etc

You'll see some of the options above involve tweaking your blog template or installing widgets in order to provide your new Feedburner feed URL to your subscribers via a chicklet, grabbing Headline Animator for use in your email signature, forum signature etc. All good stuff for publicity, so make use of them.

You should also redirect your blog's native feed to your Feedburner feed's URL, if you can (more info on redirection). Here's how to redirect Blogger feeds. There are specific instructions for various other platforms on how to redirect your feed to your Feedburner feed's URL in the Feedburner help: TypePad redirection, and self-hosted WordPress feed redirection - sorry, feed redirection doesn't seem currently possible with WordPress.com or MySpace.

Another important thing to do with your blog is to tweak the auto-discovery settings (more on how to tweak auto-discovery ).

What about submitting your feed to search engines and feed aggregators? Well, I think activating and making full use of PingShot is enough, myself. See my previous post on how to publicise your feed generally. There are also other things you can try like turning your feed into a Google Gadget and submitting your feed to iGoogle (the Feedburner Browserfriendly service has the option to add to Google, but you could also add the Add to Google button to your blog sidebar if you want to, see Chicklets above).

Monitoring your Feed burner feed

If you want to keep an eye on your Feedburner feed and have Feedburner notify you of any problems, you can sign up for FeedBulletin via the My Account page once you've logged in to Feedburner.

You can get that info by email, or by private feed (which you can even password protect if you wish) - if you choose the feed and want to keep it private, see these suggestions for keeping Feed Bulletin private.

Want more than one Feedburner feed? and feed risks

Now here's a tip. As you'll have figured from what I said above, you can in fact have more than one Feedburner feed for the same blog or site, as many as you like really (I assume there's a limit but I've not hit it yet!).

Just go through the whole process of burning your feed again, entering the URL of your native blog feed (e.g. http://www.consumingexperience.com/atom.xml or http://www.consumingexperience.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=atom in the case of ACE) - and note down the new Feedburner feed URL that's produced, or change its ending to any one you want that's not already taken.

Then you can use the different feed URLs for different purposes, tweaking Feedburner settings separately for each feed as you wish. That's how I'm able to provide subscribers to ACE's feed with a choice of feeds (here's how to offer subscribers their choice of full feed or partial feed (titles/excerpts only) - or even headlines only, as they prefer).

It's even been known for people to burn feeds from blogs or sites other than their own, in order to tweak the resulting feed in a way that better suits them. I'm not commenting on the legalities or moralities of that, just be aware than once you put out a feed, others can make use of it. Others can scrape your blog too, but it's certainly easier for them to copy your content wholesale if you put out a feed. (This is nothing to do with Feedburner - if you activate your feed, then you bear that risk whether or not you choose to burn your feed through Feedburner.) Personally I think it's worth offering a feed despite the risks, but it's up to you.

More info, help and support

Feedburner have useful help pages for almost everything, plus support forums (Google Group). I'm usually there for a while on Sundays, though it seems to be every 2 or 3 weeks at the moment.

The help on the Feedburner forums, from both Feedburner staff and ordinary users, was certainly invaluable when I were a mere baby blogger trying to to find my way in the weird world of Web 2.0 (thanks to all the Feedburner team!).

See also Google's tips for feed publishers.

And for more basic info on feeds generally, see part 1 of my introductory feeds basics 101 series where I covered the basics about feeds, and part 2 how to activate and publicise (in a basic way) your blog feed, and my intro to podcasting.

Monday, 22 October 2007

Feeds basics 101: introduction to newsfeeds (part 1)

Feeds, RSS feeds, Atom feeds, XML feeds, newsfeeds, web feeds, they're increasingly common on the internet these days - but what are they, how do you subscribe, and how do you publish and publicise your own news feed? This post is a 3-part introductory tutorial guide to web feeds, aimed at intelligent non-geeks who don't want to be treated like idiots just because they don't wish to struggle through a sea of unnecessarily befuddling tech jargon, but do want to learn rather more about feeds than the average dummy, with a few tips and tricks along the way.

The introduction of the graphical Web, the point-and-click web browser, revolutionised the Internet. Only a relatively small proportion of Net users may be using newsfeeds right now, but more and more are going to. I personally think that feeds are just as revolutionary as the point-and-click Web was. And lately many of the posts I've been wanting to write have been to do with feeds, so it's about time I did a more integrated post for beginners on feeds, as I'm aware that actually a lot of people still don't use them - not counting of course those Web-savvy denizens of the Net who virtually live online.

There are lots of intros or guides out there already on feeds e.g. by Feedburner, or by the BBC (more pictorial BBC version), or on Wikipedia. This is just my own personal take on the subject. My emphasis will be on feeds for Blogger or Blogspot blogs, but most of what I say will be relevant to other blogging platforms too, and indeed other kinds of websites which aren't blogs. As always I'd appreciate any feedback on clarity, any errors etc. (and should any publishers be thinking of a book on feeds or other techie subjects for the intelligent lay person, please see my sidebar for how to reach me!)

First I'll explain the basics generally (but still with a practical bias), then in part 2 I'll explain how to make use of the feed that's associated with your blog i.e. how to publish and publicise your own feed, and finally in part 3 I'll show you how to use the free Feedburner service to "syndicate" your blog or website, including the use of some of its other helpful features, summarising some things I've learned from fiddling with my own feed.

Note that this basic post doesn't discuss the underlying coding or how to create a feed from scratch (phew, I hear some of you say), but rather aims to give you enough info so that you can figure out for yourself how best to make use of feeds. It does assume basic knowledge of HTML (for which see e.g. Blogger's help on HTML) and basic understanding of computer files and folders.

1. Feeds - the very basics

So what's a feed anyway?

A news feed (feed for short) is in fact a special kind of text file written in a particular standardised format, which can be automatically created by certain Web server software from sources such as webpages. Newsfeed files may be flexibly used in all sorts of ways by software that knows how to fetch them and read them (feed readers) and possibly do other things with them.

That all sounds a bit broad and general, but the kinds of things you can get feeds for and how feeds can be put to use really have changed radically, as I'll come to later, and no doubt they will keep on evolving.

It may be clearer if we step back a bit and start with the most basic and popular function of feeds.

With websites whose content often changes, such as news sites or blogs, it can be a pain as well as time-consuming to have to revisit sites constantly just to check what's new. Using newsfeeds, you don't have to.

If a site publishes a newsfeed (also known as "syndicating" the site), you can just "subscribe" to its feed via software or Web services known as "feed readers" or "aggregators". Feeds are also sometimes known as "syndicated content". (Confusingly, "syndicate" sometimes seems to be used for the act of a user subscribing to a site, as well as the act of publishing a feed.)

Subscribe to all the site feeds you want, and then the new content from all these different sources will be automatically fed through to you to skim at your leisure at once.

Effcctively, feeds are a kind of "pull" technology where your desired content is automatically pulled to your computer behind the scenes so that you can access it all together in one single place, rather than your having to go look for it in all sorts of different places. Some might say it's a kind of push technology but strictly it isn't, and I say "push" in hushed tones as it became a bit of a dirty word after it was overhyped and fell flat on its face in the earlier days of the Web. The concept is excellent but it was pushed (if you'll forgive the pun) before its time, that's all. Push technology (e.g. instant messaging), or should I say quasi-push in the case of feeds, is certainly coming into its own now. But I digress.

Here is a (deservedly much linked to) lighthearted video by Common Craft called "RSS in Plain English" which explains the "push" aspect of web feeds very clearly for non-geeks:

Click To Play

Feeds as shop windows

Another analogy I dreamt up for feeds (when writing my intro to podcasting) is this: shopping. Yep, you heard the shopping analogy for feeds here first at A Consuming Experience! Trust a girly geek to come up with that...

So what do I mean, shopping? Well, think of it like this: instead of your having to keep going round your favourite stores to check what's new there (their webpages), shops display their latest wares in their shop windows (their feeds). You put your feet up at home and send your faithful personal shopper (feedreader) out regularly to check if there's anything new in the windows of your favorite shops - if there is anything new (and of course they'll know because, like any decent personal assistant, they've kept track of what they saw the last time they went there), then they'll bring it back home to you.

So you can have a replica of your favourite shop windows in your own living room, which you can rummage through at leisure in your own time, and you haven't even had to leave your house. Or, in the vast majority of cases, even pay a penny for what's been brought home to you.

Now the analogy isn't exact - some shops only put out free samples in their windows (partial feeds or excerpts only feeds) rather than the full product, the full feed, and you'll then have to go into the shop personally (visit the Website) if you want to see their new stuff properly - but I think that analogy helps to give a general but fairly accurate idea.

Feeds content - what do feeds cover, what are they for?

Just as there are blogs on everything under the sun, so there are feeds on every subject under the sun. That's because every blogging platform worth its salt automatically produces a newsfeed for each blog - i.e. it automatically dresses up its own shop window to show off any new goodies inside. You just need to open up the curtains and expose your wares, so to speak (and no, we're not talking Amsterdam shop windows, OK? This is a family blog. Harrumph).

What's more, you can have feeds for more things than just webpages. For instance, for many blogs you can get a comment feed, which is a feed showing all the comments posted to that blog, handy to help watch out for new comments on that blog. And you can have "per post" comment feeds, which show just the comments added on a particular blog post or webpage (see the Blogger feeds help). With Blogger you can even have "label feeds", showing all the posts which have been given a particular "label" by the author (i.e. posts which have been classed as being about a topic like "mobiles"), if the subscriber wants to keep track of new posts from a blog just on a single subject.

Feeds can be used not just for text, such as most Webpage content, but also to distribute other kinds of content too - notably, media feeds are possible for multi-media content such as music, video, even documents like PDFs. For instance, people can get MP3s via feeds, a.k.a. podcasts - e.g. internet radio shows (more on podcasting - feeds for music etc - in my podcasting guide). Video feeds are known as vidcasts, webcasts or videocasts, etc; Blogger for instance have tested and now allow podcasting of videos on Blogger blogs. And photographers can provide their uploaded photos as a photo feed or picture feed (e.g. Photobucket or PicasaWeb; and Flickr photostreams can be available as feeds), and even via Google Pack screensaver to people's desktops. You can get all Web 2.0 and social media with feeds too - e.g. Google Reader lets its users share, on a public webpage (or via its feed, of course) or by email, or as a small clip that can be embedded on any website or blog, individual selected items in their subscribed feeds or all items they've assigned selected tags to.

More and more Web services and applications, for example social networking sites, are providing feeds for their users, or re-purposing feeds. You can keep on top of the status of Blogger and its hiccups via the Blogger Status Feed, for instance, or subscribe to Google Finance or Google News, or government info if you really must. Or, less prosaically, transmit your blog feed into space! Twitter, the social networking service which uses SMS text etc, provides feeds. So does Facebook. For mobile phones, Nokia's WidSets uses feeds to enable users to read blogs and access other things on their cellphones, and feeds are also used by Twitter competitor Jaiku, which was recently acquired by Google after just a year and a half in operation (so Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström's 5 principles for Web 2.0 success are very well worth noting!). You can even get calendar feeds of diary entries or events e.g. from Google Calendar, Upcoming.org etc, and potentially transport schedules on Google Transit. Many Web search engines base their indexing of sites on the feeds which sites like news sites output, e.g. Google's Sitemaps, and Google's Blog Search. (Apologies, this paragraph somehow disappeared from the draft when publishing - it should have been in the original published version.)

How do you subscribe to a newsfeed? - tools: feed readers

You can subscribe to a feed in two main ways:

on your own computer - use a feed reader program (a.k.a. "news aggregator" or "feed aggregator" programs like Juice - I'm going to say "reader" as it's shorter to type), or
via any computer connected to the Net - sign up for an online Web-based feed reader service (they're mostly free) like Bloglines (the pic at the top of this post is a Bloglines screenshot), Google Reader which dates from 2005 (and which you can now even read offline), or Netvibes, which you can then access via a browser from any computer, subscribing to feeds via the service and then viewing all your subscribed feeds together on the feed reader's site.

A full roundup of feed readers is beyond the scope of this post - see the Wikipedia list of feed aggregators - but you can get lots of free ones such as SharpReader for Windows, or the multi-platform podcast-dedicated Juice. I have an early beta version of the free multimedia friendly Fireant for Mac and Windows which supports text as well as podcasts (Juice doesn't do text, just media - though what's "media" anyway?):

Increasingly too, feed support is being built into browsers, e.g. the fab free browser Firefox has a basic built-in reader (more a feed subscriber really), known as "Live Bookmarks", plus you can get free feed reader extensions for Fox like Sage. The lightning quick free browser Opera has supported feeds for ages. And Internet Explorer 7 also has a feed reader built in, though earlier versions don't.

We're also seeing feeds being displayed not just in specialised feed readers but also as part of other kinds of info on personalised webpages or customizable webpages like My Yahoo!, via Google's iGoogle personalized homepage with Firefox toolbar integration e.g. through gadgets, or even MyBlogLog (e.g. this blog's MyBlogLog page) and the Blog Friends app on Facebook (more on Blog Friends), and even in people's blog sidebars. In fact, it's possible to display the content of feeds on any webpage just using some Javascript (talk about recursive!), and I'll be doing a separate post on feed display via Javascript. You can even get feeds on mobile phones, and not just through iGoogle.

Feed readers will normally display in a list all the feeds you subscribe to. You can then choose a particular feed to see the latest items from that feed (rather like choosing a folder in your email mailbox to see all the emails within that folder). Links within items will usually be clickable too.

Here's a screenshot of the Web-based Google Reader showing the feed from my pal Kirk's blog:

And here's Fireant showing the contents of a text feed:

While here's Fireant showing an MP3 podcast of Creative Commons-licensed music by Uwe Hermann - I can download individual songs and play them from within Fireant (controls at the top right of the window below):

(A side issue, but the beta 1.0 version of Fireant I have doesn't seem to be able to handle video enclosures properly e.g. from the Bloggerindraft blog - nothing at all. I hope later versions display Blogger video enclosures properly.)

Now, as well as what media types they can handle, readers differ also in how you view, filter and generally manage your subscribed feeds and individual items in the feed, how often to refresh the feed (check for new items in your subscribed feeds and download them), etc, and also as regards the level of control the user has. The most basic feed readers may be able to handle only text, but not podcasts (music files) and the like - or vice versa, e.g. as mentioned Juice handles MP3s but not blog posts text.

How do you subscribe to a newsfeed? - mechanics

In terms of mechanics, to subscribe to a particular feed manually you just:

note the feed's Web address or URL (copying it to clipboard is of course the easiest way) - these days feed icons are standardised and you can get the feed URL by rightclicking on the standard orange feed icon , known as a "chicklet", shown on the site - and then copying the link or shortcut (which will be the feed's URL)
launch or go to your feed reader of choice, if it's not already open
go to the relevant "Add Feed" or similar function of your news reader (often it's a + icon)
paste the feed address link and OK.

After subscribing to a feed, the new feed will be there in your list of feeds, and you can of course then view the added feeds in whichever way works for your reader.

But there are easier ways.

Auto-discovery - what is it?

Many feedreaders can even detect a site or blog's feed URL automatically from the site itself, if the blog or website has been set up to allow that, just by your giving the feed reader the site's main homepage URL. Many feed readers automatically detects the feed URL while you're on the site's webpage, you don't have to give it any further info. That's known as "feed autodiscovery". (I'll cover how to enable and provide prospective subscribers with auto-discovery for your own feed if you're a publisher, in part 2 of this series).

For instance, in the Firefox browser, if you're viewing a webpage which has auto-discovery enabled for its associated feeds you'll see the orange feed icon in the browser address bar, and if you click on the orange feed icon (a little obscured by the mouse in the pic below), it'll give you the option to subscribe. In the case of my blog, I offer readers a choice of 3 possible types of feeds as like others I don't believe in only excerpts (here's how to offer a choice); hence, clicking on the feed icon will list all 3 options to choose from:

There are other ways to autodiscover feed URLs too, if you're a potential subscriber - for instance the online feed aggregation service Bloglines offers users a special bookmarklet or favelet which you can add to you browser toolbar. Click that bookmark while you're on a website and it'll try to auto-discover and list the feeds available for that site or blog, so that you can then choose which ones you'd like to subscribe to via Bloglines.

Oddly, that favelet doesn't work on my blog main page, only offering the comments feed URL:

Whereas the bookmarklet does work properly when viewing individual post pages:

So, as you can see, autodiscovery isn't always foolproof. But in many cases, it does help speed things up for would-be subscribers.

How do newsfeeds work behind the scenes, in simple terms?

RSS (also sometimes known as Really Simple Syndication) is one main standard used by websites to syndicate their content, i.e. a feed file is a text file written in RSS format. The other well known standard format for feeds which you're likely to come across is newer and, many say, better: Atom. (There are in fact several flavours of RSS itself, confusingly. I won't go into the standards wars here. For the history see e.g. Wikipedia). "RSS feed" is sometimes used synonymously for "feed" or "newsfeed", even when referring to Atom feeds - a bit like "hoover" is used for "vacuum".

Obviously, you can view a feed published using RSS only if your reader supports RSS. And similarly with Atom feeds. However, most readers these days can handle both formats, so generally you don't need to worry about that.

To publish a feed, a web site or blogging platform basically takes the HTML file for the webpage or blog post and constructs a new file in RSS or Atom format out of it (the feed file usually ends in ".xml", but it could sometimes be something else like ".rdf" or ".aspx"). It is that specially-produced feed file which feed readers will download and display.

XML is, the way I think of it anyway, the big brother of HTML - which, as you know, is the language in which webpages are written behind the scenes so that they can be interpreted and displayed on your computer (relatively!) consistently by browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. RSS and Atom are basically dialects of XML, and you could say that a feed file is written in a machine-readable way using RSS or Atom.

You don't need to know the coding ins & outs, the syntax for RSS or Atom, to be able to make use of feeds as a publisher or a subscriber. But if you want to, you can actually view the text of a .xml feed file, its underlying RSS or Atom code, via a text editor like Notepad - just as you can view the source of a webpage, which is really just a text file with the ending .html. Indeed, you can view a feed file direct in many browsers - just enter the feed's URL in the browser address bar. But just like the raw HTML of a webpage doesn't look very nice in view source or a text editor, similarly a feed often doesn't look very pretty in a browser, especially older browsers, as it was designed for software not humans - although more up to date browsers can in fact cope fine with their display. And although browsers are incorporating feedreading functionality, viewing a feed via a modern browser is still not as userfriendly, powerful or flexible as using a dedicated feed reader (or, if you prefer, just going in your browser to the original webpages which the feed file was based on). As an example, if you really want to see a feed in your browser click on this for my blog's RSS feed - opens in new window.

But what is in a feed file exactly? What info does the user get sent?

Now having said earlier that a webpage is converted into a feed file, that's not 100% accurate. It's not necessarily the whole of a website or even a single webpage which is converted to produce the feed.

With blogs, commonly it's only the main page or home page of the blog (and not post or item pages, or even archive pages), which is used as the source for the feed file. Or it's the latest X posts only whose contents are copied into the feed. (Those who have lots of control over their site and server where their blog files are stored may be able to create feeds from other pages or other parts of the site, but with most blogging platforms you won't have that level of control, they do what they do and that's it.)

With Blogger blogs, it used to be that the feed displayed exactly the number of posts set to be shown on your main page (so if you'd set your main page to show 10 posts, the feed would contain your 10 latest posts, if 50 then the latest 50 etc). But since since the rollout of the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta, despite its widgety goodness and enhanced developer-friendliness the default number shown in the base Blogger feed is now 25 posts - although there's a way to set Blogger to show more than 25 posts (or indeed fewer), which I'll cover in a later post.

So, taking the Blogger example, because the feed by default just reflects your last 25 posts, as you publish new posts the feed's content will inevitably change, with new posts added to the top of the feed "pushing off" the older posts from the bottom.

Effectively, whenever you publish a new post, Blogger knows to reconstruct your main blog page (what Blogger call the "index" page) - and, at the same time, it will also reconstruct your feed so that the feed will show the 25 newest posts as and when requested by a subscriber.

But remember that a blogging platform only automatically produces feed files if that feature is activated or enabled. It normally is, by default, but if you have problems you might want to check that. I deal with how to do that on Blogger later in part 2.

Also, in terms of the content of your feed, it's not necessarily the full text of each post that is shown in a feed - it could be excerpts only e.g. the first X characters of each post. I'll discuss that in more detail in part 2, but basically with a text feed the blog owner can tweak things to control how much (or how little) of each post is sent with the feed.

Feeds can contain text, but they can also contain links, e.g. Web hyperlinks. As I alluded to earlier, feeds have developed so that they can "transmit" not only text but also media like songs, videos etc. But the feed doesn't "include" or transmit full MP3 files, but rather links to those files. As long as the blogger / feed publisher has their site set up to produce the media feed properly by including special links to media files in a form recognised by feed readers, called "enclosures" (as to which see my podcasting intro), and the reader can cope with media files, then a subscriber can receive audio and video too, even PDF or Word documents etc, via a feed. See the screenshots of Fireant above, for instance.

How does the reader know when a feed has been updated?

As mentioned above, when you publish a new post your feed should automatically be updated by your blogging software constructing a new XML file to include the new post.

When I first heard about feeds I puzzled over the basic question of how a reader knows a feed has been updated before I found out that, often, it doesn't have to. When a user subscribes to a particular feed, what their reader does (assuming it's open and active, of course, where the feed reader is on their own computer) is to check every so often whether a subscribed feed has changed, and then fetch the changes back. How often it does this can usually be set in the options or preferences for the feed reader.

Using my personal shopper analogy, your personal shopper makes a note of the shops you want it to check and what it's fetched back for you so far from those shop windows, and you can tell it how often to check your fave shop windows for new wares. And then it does that. So your reader keeps track of the changes for you and monitors your feeds of choice for changes.

Confession: I rarely use feed readers, myself - somehow, the way my mind works, I prefer email alerts like Google Alerts. And in fact you can get feed updates via email, through services such as Feedblitz and Feedburner's email service. But I still need to know about feeds and I still have to provide them on my blog, because I know many people prefer them. And feeds are now important for many more reasons than just subscribers' convenience, as I've already mentioned.

In part 2, I'll go into more detail about ways to publish and publicise your own feed.