Lately I became interested in ways to keep tabs on various websites. I have been seeing syndication feeds around for years, and more and more websites offer channels. These channels are presented in many ways, most often behind a little orange button that sports the letters XML.

Useful channels are often provided by generous webmasters who search the Internet on a regular basis for new and interesting links. Individuals can subscribe to these channels using a news aggregator. Updates are instantaneous and it is possible to monitor a specific topic using many sources by visiting a single page.

The amount of information provided by the feed varies with the source. Most often a headline will be followed by a snippet of text from the article. In other cases the feed could be limited to only headlines, or it could contain the entire text.

My introduction to RSS came when I downloaded a feed reader. It worked well but I did not enjoy opening another piece of software to read the feeds, especially since I often had to visit the website with my browser to read the full story anyway. I now would like to explore how to bring the feeds right to my own website and to study some of the free rss news reader sites that allow those without their own website to create customized feed lists.