Go! ‘Necks! Go!

While I’ve been deeply immersed in the online world and blogs I’m sure that most of you have not. Since that is the case I thought now would be a good time to explain one of the features of gonecksgo.com, namely “feeds”.

First of all, the term “feed” is becoming more and more prevalent and seems to be replacing the less user-friendly terms “RSS”, “XML”, and “Atom” in the blogging community. Feed simply refers to the syndication of that particular websites content. As an aside, RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication but merely seeing the acronym is quite confusing unless you know the meaning behind it.

To put it as simply as possible subscribing to a websites “feed” you are subscribing to a specialized page from that website that is immediately updated the second the website is updated — whether the update is with new content or an update to previous content you are notified in either instance. This specialized page is written in a different format and coding language from regular web pages and will often give you very odd results if you view it in a regular web browser.

Feeds are by far the easiest way to keep up to date with all the newest posts, articles, headlines, and essays on your favorite websites.

How do you subscribe?

There are many different options available to anyone who wants to subscribe to feeds from their favorite websites. Online solutions such as Bloglines and NewsGator Online are both free options. They will allow you to subscribe to whatever feeds you’d like and each time you visit either website they will automatically check each feed for updates.

Another option is purchasing or downloading specialize apps or programs commonly called feed readers, news readers, RSS readers or clients, or feed aggregators — FeedDemon, NewsGator for Microsoft Outlook, and NetNewsWire are a few of the more common readers. By installing these applications and programs on your computer you can add subscriptions by entering the feed URL/address — usually something like http://website.com/feed/ or http://website.com/rss/ (some addresses/URL’s may begin with feed: such as the feed for gonecksgo.com, feed:http://gonecksgo.com/feed/).

With the impending release of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows and the current release of Firefox for the same platform, and Safari and Firefox for Macintosh, subscribing to feeds is even easier. Each of these browsers has built in feed recognition and will either allow you to read the feeds — you can save them as bookmarks for convenience — or automatically open your feed reader and ask if you’d like to subscribe.

How do you recognize a feed?

In most cases links to a websites feed will be in the sidebar or at the bottom of the page. Content heavy websites will include links to their feeds on all pages or at least a huge majority of them.

Another way to look for feeds is to look for this logo somewhere on the website. There are also other variations of buttons that will have the text “RSS”, “XML”, or “Atom” with a usually brightly coloured background.

So now that you know what a feed is and generally where to look for them, why not subscribe to our feed.