Atom Feeds

My entire habit of online reading has recently been super-enhanced. I have just become hip to web-site feeds and site feed services.

The gist of it is this: Many websites (especially ones that are frequently updated like news sites and weblogs) support some type of RSS or Atom feed. This hyper-link “publishes” the site’s updates to be fed to any service that can “receive” these. There are many such services available, but I’m using Google Reader, which is in its beginning stages and still under improvement. These services will search for and upload all the feeds you “subscribe” to. That way, you don’t have run around the internet like a chicken with your head cut-off, checking all the websites you regularly go to for updates. You don’t even have to visit them at all, you can just log in to your news feed server which will update you when your sites are updated. Google Reader will even load the text of the article for you, so you don’t even have to go the source site to read it! That’s why it’s called a subscription: the site-feed comes right to your online “front-door,” just like a newspaper. Voila. Your life and mine is simplified. Praise the Lord.

Here is a wikipedia article that explains all this, and here is a link to Google reader. Make your life easier now.

Also, because of this wonderful technology, I have added a new item to my blog, where you can access all of my recommended or ‘shared’ online reading. You can either do this by clicking the individual links to my recommendations in “My Shared Reading,” or you can click the bottom link 'Read more...' which will take you to a page where you can read all of my shared articles without having to read them link by link.

Happy reading!