January 29, 2004: RSS feeds

Lately, more and more sites show this image: orange xml image. Clicking this image shows an xml document. This xml document is called an rss feed. Such a feed contains a collection of related 'news items'. An item is can be considered as a summary of an article. It contains a title, a short description and a link to the complete article. To read a feed one uses a news aggregator. Such a program can regularly pull a feed from a site and display its contents. Rather than visiting all your favorite sites every day, or even multiple times a day to check for updates, the aggregator collects it for you and delivers it directly to you.
Since so many sites offer an rss feed, especially with the increasing popularity of technical oriented blogs, it is a wunderful way of collecting news. It only took me a while to find a decent aggregator. Many of them are still under development and evolving into a handy tool. Currently I use Bottomfeeder, a no-nonsense, cross platform aggregator so I can use the same on Linux and Windows.

* A good, extensive explanation can be found here
* A list of OTN rss feeds and Oracle related blogs can be found here.
* More information about rss can be found at this site.
Posted by Aino at 17:53