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Any site that publishes information in discrete "stories", where each story has a "headline" or "title" can publsh an RSS feed. Some people will view the headlines for the stories in a browser like Firefox with it's "live bookmarks", others will subscribe to feeds in a service like http://my.yahoo.com/, and still others will select one of a number of special programs called aggregators.
On Web pages, web feeds (RSS or Atom) are typically linked with the word
"Subscribe", an orange rectangle 
,
or with the letters 
or 
. Many news
aggregators such as My Yahoo! publish subscription buttons (
) for use on Web
pages to simplify the process of adding news feeds.
The world of RSS is continually changing and expanding. Firefox has supported RSS for several versions, the new version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 is reported to have RSS built into it as well. I don't know how much detail APCUG members would like to see us go into on technical subjects like RSS. In this article I am going to focus primarilly on just one aspect of RSS: How it is implemented in Firefox with Live Bookmarks. If you would like to see us having a technical article each quarter, going into greater detail on this topic, or any other technical topic, then please visit http://apcug.net/contacts/forms/editor_ submit.htm and let me know what topics you are interested in (and if you would be willing to write a regular technical column yourself, let me know that as well.)
Here is what the WaPo World feed looked like at 5pm Monday, Tuesday May 23.
A few hours earlier, or a few hours later, the feed might have been very different, because it consists of the 10 or so most recent stories in that subject. Notice that two of them have a special symbol. This is their "Favicon", and it shows that I read those articles.
The WaPo World Feed is here, and if you click on that link, you will get a page of XML code that will not make any sense. That is because you are not expected to view the page, it is for your computer to view.
For example if we look at my browser
In the RSS folder on my Bookmark Toolbar I have folders for Technical sites, Favorite Blogs, Journalism, Law, Iraq, and some other stuff. In this graphic my mouse was on Technical, so I got the flyout of all of the sites in my Technical Folder, including the Houston Chronicle's Tech Blog, CNET News, ZDNet, Tech Spot, InternetNews, etc. I stopped on TechBlog, and I see I can read articles on Staring at the distant Vista, How far we've come, Accidental pilgrimage to coffee Mecca, Weakest link in the chain, All hail the mighty MeMo, Venturing into Vistaville, Come on in! The water's fine, the comments are open, Windows Vista "minimum" specs released, Dell to use AMD's Opteron chips, There goes the neighborhood, etc. If any of those headlines catch my attention, I just have to click on it, and the story opens in my browser.
There are other things you can do with an RSS Feed. For example this site will allow you to combine several feeds into a single feed. A number of Tulsa Bloggers have gotten together and have combined their feeds into this site, and they even have a web page that shows those feeds. You can post an RSS feed on a website using a service from FeedDigest. This site shows an example of a previous version this service that I used in an article I wrote on Comparison of Blog Services.
Trend Micro has a service where you can add a Virus Info Feed on your website (I have it on the TCS WebSite) and (Feedroll) has a lot of RSS Feeds available for easy syndication by news readers and other websites. Some of the ones that might be of interest to a computer user group include About Digital Cameras, About Email, About Focus on Mac Support, About Focus on PC Support, About Home Theater, About Shareware/Freeware, About Web Search, About Wireless / Networking, BBC News | Technology, CNET News.com, CNET News.com - Access, CNET News.com - Business Tech, CNET News.com - Digital Life, CNET News.com - E-Business, CNET News.com - Media 2.0, CNET News.com - Newsmakers, CNET News.com - Perspectives, Gizmodo, InfoWorld: Top News, Lockergnome's IT Professionals, Lockergnome's Linux Fanatics, Lockergnome's OS X Fanatics, Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips, Lockergnome's Tech News Watch, Lockergnome's Web Developers, NYT > Technology, PC World: Latest Technology News, Slashdot, and Yahoo! News: Technology News. If you look at the TCS WebSite you will see we display About's "Focus on PC Support".
A good RSS feed would be something that had from 3 to 30 new items a day. Any fewer, and people would be unlikely to want to subscribe to it, because they would get the impression that it "seldom changed", and any more, and you would have so many changes that a viewer might miss an important one if they only checked once a day. If you have fewer entries each day, you might want to use BlogDigger to combine your feed with some other sources that also had few new items each day, and if you had more than 30, you might want to do like the newspapers do, and break your feed down into several narrower subject feeds.
APCUG certainly does not have enough "News Items" to justify an RSS feed, although at one time I did suggest that we might want to talk to some of the syndicators of the Feedroll feeds and see if we could select items from them that User Groups might find particularly interesting, and generate a feed with just those items, plus any APCUG item as it became available, and urge UGs to use Feed Digest to convert it to a form to post on their UG websites, but I could never get anyone interested in the idea.
This article just scratches the surface of RSS. We could have covered various RSS Readers, the differences between various RSS formats and Atom feeds, advertising in RSS feeds, and other RSS feed services, but I dont know whether you want to see articles like those. If you would like to see us having a technical article each quarter, going into greater detail on this topic, or any other technical topic, then please visit Don Singleton, APCUG President">the APCUG WebSite and let me know what topics you are interested in (and if you would be willing to write a regular technical column yourself, let me know that as well.)