In this post I’m intending to give you a simple, but important knowledgeable facts regarding feeds. Also this post will help you to understand how the blog syndication works with feeds.

Let’s assume you are reading many web sites such as news websites which frequently update their content. Normally you have to go these websites directly and need to look for any updates time to time. Just think about the mess you are going to face when you are reading such kind of 20 websites daily. Also it consumes much time and data when you are visiting each and every website time to time to know about updates.

So the solution for the above problem is web feeds. When publishing a new content, the feed can be customized to show it's feed either completely or half or with or without images. Anyone can subscribe to a web feed. That means they can instruct their computer programs (Eg: Firefox, Akregator, FeedReader) or web programs (Eg: Google Reader) to read and store updated content in relevant websites within specific time duration. So the user can see updated web contents at once through that program.

There are many advantages in feeds. As mentioned before the users can read new updated contents without visiting the each website. Also it will inform users when the new content published and it allows users to select posts according to their interest by providing summarized feed. The most important thing is that it will protect user’s privacy. Most websites are asking your email address to send newsletters. So there’s a high possibility to receive spam emails to your email address. When you need to unsubscribe from that websites it will ask you to follow specific course of action. But there’s no such kind of hassle when you subscribe a website through web feeds. You can give up reading the feed any time when you want.

Why computer programs cannot read updated web contents without attaching a web feed? Majority of you will have this problem on your minds. The different websites have different contents from different format. There’s no specific standard for web contents so that computer programs are facing difficulties when reading those. That’s why you need web feeds. Web feeds are made according to the international standards. Web feeds have same format in every website. Therefore one program can able to read all feeds. That means feeds are a specific standard of posts which allow to display updated web contents in different web sites in the world.

It's strongly recommended you to have a web feed in your website if your website updates frequently.

Up to above point we are talking about the web feed. Have you ever thought of the meaning of the popular word called RSS? RSS is also a one kind of web feed. There’s another kind of web feed called Atom. The above two kind of web feeds have bit technical differences and will be done same kind of activities. So here I’m not going to explain it in detail. The reason for the popularity of RSS is because that it’s the older one and mostly used one in websites. The main Blog service providers such as WordPress and Blogger will provide both RSS and Atom to their blogs. But in WordPress, main feed is Atom and in the Blogger it RSS.

How to find feed address in your Blog

If your want to get RSS feed in WordPress then add "/feed/" after the end of blog url.

Eg: http://example.wordpress.com/feed/

If you want to get Atom feed in a WordPress then add "/feed/atom/" after the end of blog url.

Eg: http://example.wordpress.com/feed/atom/

If you want to get Atom feed in a Blogger then add "/feeds/post/default/" after the end of blog url.

Eg: http://example.blogspot.com/feeds/post/default/

If your want to get RSS feed in Blogger then add "/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" after the end of blog url.

Eg: http://example.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Now it’s not a problem to find a feed address in your blog.

If you want to find feed address in other websites, if that websites provide web feeds then look for RSS logo or look for link such as “RSS” “Feed” “XML” “Subscribe to Feeds”.