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Working with feeds (Mac OS-X)
What`s a feed?
Feeds are offered by many websites in order to make their news available on a direct way. They can then be exploited by adequate programs.
Please note: This course describes how to use feeds under Mac OS-X. The same course is also available for Microsoft Windows users:
www.olefaschool.org/courses/feeds_ie7_en
Advantages of feeds (over consulting the news directly on the website)
- Feeds are limited to the actual content, so the entire site design doesn't need to be loaded.
- Feeds can be subscribed to. In this case your feed reader can check them regularly for new entries. In an overview of all your subsribed feeds, you can see at a glance which feeds have been updated.
- New entries will be downloaded in advance. At the moment you want to read them you don't have any waiting time. You don't even need to be connected to the Internet.
- Feeds can be easily sorted (e.g. by date, author, title) or filtered by keywords without the page having to be reloaded from the Web.
- Old news entries can be archived, so that they'll even stay available when they are no longer featured on the original website.
Feed readers
Feeds can be used in many ways and with with a multitude of applications.
- Most current Internet browsers (e.g. Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox...) offer an integrated feed reader that allows you to place subscribed feeds among your favorites.
- Diverse mail clients (e.g. Apple Mail) offer the possibility to subscribe to feeds and to display their entries similarly to normal e-mail messages.
- There are also separate feed reader programs. For example, some of them offer to display the newest headlines directly in a widget on your Mac OS-X dashboard.
Example: www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/news/rssreader.html
- Some webservices offer to keep a look on any feeds and to forward you new feed entries as classic e-mails.
Example: www.rssfwd.com
Websites with feed support
a) OLEFAschool projects:
- Our news section here on OLEFAschool (with OLEFA news and links to interesting school projects) is available as a feed. (Direct link: www.olefaschool.org/resources/xml/atom/news/feed.xml)
- All OLEFA school websites offer their news as feeds. (e.g. www.mamerschoulen.lu).
- Virtualib libraries (www.virtualib.net) are available as feeds, so that interested visitors can easily realize when new books have been added to their favorite libraries.
b) Ohter examples:
- Most newspapers and magazines (e.g. www.nytimes.com, www.washingtonpost.com...)
- Most blogs (e.g. blogs powered by www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com)
- Many company websites offer feeds about their new products and promotions.
This course describes how to use Apple Safari in combination with Apple Mail in order to read and to subscribe to feeds.
For other browsers (e.g. Mozilla Firefox) or separate feed readers, the procedure only differs marginally.
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