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RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or Atom - How Do You Subscribe to Blog Feeds ?

RSS Feeds SubscribeA small orange icon that says XML or an orange square with waves indicate that an RSS feed is present on a web page. But some blogs and websites go an extra mile and provide syndicated feeds in multiple formats such as Atom, RSS 1.0, RSS 0.92 and RSS 2.0.

The screen capture is from Joi's blog - site visitors can subscribe to his blog writings via three different feeds (Atom, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0) but internally, these feeds are all XML documents, have the same content arranged in reverse chronological order and differ only in representation / content formatting.

Should you worry or get confused about these extra "geeky" subscription options ? The answer is no because chances are good that your desktop news reader or web based aggregator can handle feeds in any of these syndication formats.

Just put the site address in your RSS reader and it will pick the right format automatically. And if you are subscribing to some blog with multiple feed formats through Firefox live bookmarks, choose RSS 2.0 - that's the one specification that Dave Winer wrote.

Related Tutorial: FeedBurner Feed for your Blog with AutoDiscovery

RSS sounds greek ? This video explains RSS in plain English using the example of Netflix and a traditional video store - the former sends you the new movies automatically while you have visit the latter place to check for new blockbuster titles.


Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

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