Atom and RSS News Feeds
A news feed provides a way to access the content of a web site without looking at its web pages. The format of the news feed can be one of several types including Atom, RSS and XML. Services such as FeedBurner can take the feed in any recognised format and re-serve it with enhancements compatible with any news reader.
When you subscribe to a news feed with a news reader you will receive the content in a way that is very similar to email. When you launch your news reader software it will check your subscriptions and fetch any new content. This will usually contain information such as the date and headline, author, article summary and a web link to the source article as a web page. It can also be used to embed media files such as podcasts, streaming radio and video.
The strength of using a news feed comes from how it is managed and customised. As a subscriber you are free to assemble as many news feeds as you like. And you can choose to use only the sources that interest you. For example you could choose to subscribe to the Technology section of BBC News, the headlines from The Register and a keyword match for ‘Microsoft’ from Google News.
If you use a web browser such as Firefox you can also subscribe to news feeds as Live Bookmarks. With Live Bookmarks you will see the item titles of the news feed in your bookmarks. This way you can keep details of new content within your web browser and stay up to date without even visiting the web site.
The good news is that adding a news feed to your own web site is quite straightforward. For example we created the news feed for The Railway Consultancy to help distribute their press releases to journalists and interested clients. Meta Tags are used to help web browsers and other software automatically discover the news feed when the web site is visited. However, most of the news feeds published by our clients are created automatically as a result of using a service such as Yahoo! Groups or Blogger to manage their news distribution. Blogger automatically creates its news feed in Atom format.
The format of the news feed published by a third party service doesn’t really make much difference though. Atom formatted news feeds were originally developed to address technical issues which existed with the emerging standards for RSS news feeds. They also contain many features that aren’t available in RSS 2.0 and as such are sometimes considered a superior format. However the RSS format is easier to implement and more widely recognised. RSS is also used as a general way to describe all types of news feed and is taken as the abbrevitation of Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary depending on who you talk to.
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Last updated: Friday, 20th October 2006
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