RSS feeds and ATOM feeds are simply special types of web pages. Websites typically use such feeds to notify its visitors when something new has been posted on their website. TheSiteWizard.com's RSS feed, for example, usually contains news about new articles appearing on the website as well as new or updated scripts that may be published. RSS and ATOM are simply the names of two different types of formats of the feeds. Most websites using site feeds choose to use either one or the other. From the user's perspective, however, it doesn't matter which format the site uses, since both serve the same function.
To "subscribe" to a site feed, whether RSS or ATOM, you need a feed reader. Simply point the reader to the URL (address) of the site feed, and it will do the rest: it will display the contents of the feed in a window or panel for you. The feed will look like a series of messages. Although the word "subscribe" is used, there is no actual subscription (in the traditional sense of the word) involved. You do not need to give your email address, fork out any money, nor furnish any information whatsoever. Your feed reader does all the real work: it checks the website regularly to see if the feed has been updated. If the latter has been changed, the feed reader software will inform you and allow you to read it, giving you the illusion that you have subscribed to some sort of newsletter or message service.
Some browsers already contain built-in support for tracking and reading RSS and ATOM site feeds. Often, in those browsers, all you have to do is to click on the link to the feed to subscribe to it. The browser will then alert you whenever there are new items in the site feed and provide you a way to read it from within the browser. At the time this was written, browsers that contain built-in support for tracking and reading RSS feeds include Internet Explorer 7 and above and Safari. Those who use Firefox can look for and download an add-on that allows them to read feeds.
If you have a browser that supports the reading of newsfeeds, just click on this link
https://www.thesitewizard.com/thesitewizard.xml
If you also want to track the updates for my other sites, the feed for thefreecountry.com can be found at
https://www.thefreecountry.com/thefreecountry.xml
,
and the one for howtohaven.com is available at
https://www.howtohaven.com/howtohaven.xml
.
Another alternative to using your web browser is to download specialised feed reader software. There are numerous such software around on the Internet, many of them free of charge. Since I don't use standalone feed reader software, I'm not able to give you any recommendations, but you can get free ones from thefreecountry.com's Free Offline News Feed Readers and News Aggregators page. Since they are all free, you can download as many of them as you like to find one that appeals to you.
To add thesitewizard.com's newsfeed to the software, just use the following URL:
https://www.thesitewizard.com/thesitewizard.xml
.
(Simply, click the right mouse button on the link, and select "Copy Link Location" or its equivalent from the menu that appears.
Then paste it into your feed reader at the appropriate place.)
As before, if you also want to keep up-to-date with changes on thefreecountry.com and howtohaven.com, use
https://www.thefreecountry.com/thefreecountry.xml
for thefreecountry.com and
https://www.howtohaven.com/howtohaven.xml
for howtohaven.com.
Copyright 2006-2018 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
Get more free tips and articles like this,
on web design, promotion, revenue and scripting, from https://www.thesitewizard.com/.
Do you find this article useful? You can learn of new articles and scripts that are published on thesitewizard.com by subscribing to the RSS feed. Simply point your RSS feed reader or a browser that supports RSS feeds at https://www.thesitewizard.com/thesitewizard.xml. You can read more about how to subscribe to RSS site feeds from my RSS FAQ.
This article is copyrighted. Please do not reproduce or distribute this article in whole or part, in any form.
It will appear on your page as:
How to Subscribe to or Read ATOM and RSS Site Feeds
