Using RSS/Atom feed to keep updated with developments

RSS/Atom feed icon (like the one featured in this post) may look very familier, do you ever wondered why so many websites have it and what they are there for? In this post update, we will spend a bit of time to talk about the technology behind those “WIFI” like icons and how we can use them to keep up with news feed we are insteasted.
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary but probabliy more commonly known as Really Simple Syndication, which is a type of web feed that allows browser to access updates in a more prompt fashion through a standard format. One particular benifit of RSS is to allow news contents from multiple sources to be accessed in a centralised platform. In addition, RSS is also benfitial if you want to keep tracking event developments, RSS is actively checking for new content at backstage and organising news post in chronological order. Atom is an alternative format that provides very similar feed functions as per RSS-2.0, although the technical details vary between the two, whereas Atom in general is a more robust and feature-rich approach than RSS-2.0. In case you are curious, Phoenix@BioHub proudly supports Atom-v1.0 with autodiscovery functionality (i.e. you may already find your rss aggregator picked up the feed channel from this site, and this is the reason. If you wonder what is feed aggregator, then keep reading).
RSS feeds are commonly delivered via XML file format, however XML is not a user-friendly format for human daily readings. Fortunately, we can access the feed via various news aggregator, which provides all the functionalities we mentioned above including tracking, aggregating and news notification etc.

• If you are on a Mac and using Safari as your browser, you can click on the feed icon on the top right coner or on the botton of this page to subscribe to this webpage to get all the updates once new content arrives. If you need a step-by-step guide, I hope this helps.
• For the users using Google Chrome, you may need to install a feed aggregator plug-in, like “RSS Feed Reader”. There are many available similar plug-ins on chrome web store, pick the one appealing to you. Here includes a step-by-step guide to install a Chrome plug-in, in case you may find this info useful.
• For the users prefer FireFox, similar to Chrome, a plug-in would be a reasonable approach, like “feedly”. You may also find “RSS-feed-icon-in-navbar” useful. If you require a step-by-step guide to install a FireFox plug-ins, I hope this post helps.
  
  

I hope you find this post informative, if you want to know a bit more about how to use syndication feeds, I hope this simple guide of syndication post can answer some of your questions. If you are interested in the more technical aspects of RSS-2.0 and Atom-v1.0, more readings about RSS-2.0 and Atom-1.0 compared may satisfy your appetite. Please leave me any comments or drop me a line below if have any thing would like discuss.

Bye for now.
From Robert