Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
information, know to check the web site automatically for new content and,
if there is something new, present it to the viewer. There are a few different
languages that provide the feed information: RSS which stands for one or all
of Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary, and
comes in several not entirely compatible versions, and also a separate lan-
guage called Atom. But they are all dialects of XML and, for most people,
what is in the feed link document does not actually matter; most feed readers
will know what to do with any of them.
To provide a feed, the blog page or web page will usually display an icon that
the user can click, either to get information about the feed, or actually to sub-
scribe to the feed. These icons may vary, but are usually orange, and may con-
tain “RSS”, “Atom”, “RDF” or “XML”. Additionally, modern browsers,
including the latest version of each of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and
Opera, will detect the presence of a feed link, and put an orange icon like
into the address field. Clicking on this icon will have different effects on dif-
ferent browsers. Firefox opens a window displaying the site in feed form, and
gives the user an option of methods to subscribe. The “Live Bookmarks”
option creates a feed icon in the tool bar, and subsequent articles from this site
will appear there. It also gives the option of subscribing through a different
application, which may be an email and news reader like Thunderbird, Office
Outlook or Windows Mail. In a mail or news tool, the latest feeds will appear
just as an unread email or news item, and can be marked or categorized in the
various ways that mail tools are able. Lastly, Firefox gives the option of sub-
scribing through Google or Yahoo, which may be useful if you use those sites
as portals, and through the Bloglines (bloglines.com) site, which is a web site
designed specifically for organizing feeds. Bloglines requires a free account,
but has useful tools for organizing feeds. The other browsers - Internet
Explorer, Opera and Safari - subscribe to feeds within the application itself.
However, one last option is to find the feed icon in the document itself, not
the one in the tool bar, and choose “copy link location”, which is usually avail-
able in the mouse right-click option. The link location will be a URL pointing
to an XML file. Then in the mail application, we will use Thunderbird as an
example, select a new account of type “RSS News & Blogs”. Then select
“Manage Subscriptions”, then “Add”, and paste in the URL and select “OK”.
Your mail application will then be subscribed to this site's feeds.
Feeds are typically mostly text, but may in fact consist of audio and/or video,
in which case they are known as Podcasts. The Apple iTunes application can
be used to subscribe to audio and video feeds, and can save the feed to an iPod,
hence the name. However, many applications that can present digital sound,
like MP3 players, can play podcasts.
We end this chapter with a few notes on what a researcher needs to under-
stand, should he or she wish to host a web site. Operating your own wiki or blog
may be an attractive option for collecting data. However, running an interactive
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