External feeds are used widely around the internet by many websites, including news websites, blogs and pod casts. Most external feeds require an application on the user’s computer. Most external feed readers require you to simply enter the URL of the feed and the application will automatically download the feed. These feeds are often short descriptions and links to full news/blog articles. External feeds are received as XML and are then parsed by the application itself so that the user has a nice clean view. Otherwise it would be pretty unlikely that any user would understand the content. The applications that are used to get the external feed are normally referred to as aggregators, these aggregators often have the option of a periodical update, meaning you can set a certain time you know your computer will be on and the program will automatically check for updates on all your feeds, if however your computer isn’t turned on at that time, it is more than likely that the aggregator will automatically check for updates as you turn on the computer and a live internet connection is available. These feed aggregators act very much like an email client, they give you a list of news topics. You can sort the list by date, by title etc, they also have the option of being categorized so you can find what you want by viewing the right category. Most of today’s modern internet browsers have an external feed aggregator built in, for example Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera and more. Most of these browsers require a simple click of a button to subscribe to an external feed. The web browsers with built in aggregators make the subscription process even easier and more often than not have a button next to the web site URL. This button will take you to the aggregator screen, from this screen you can subscribe to the thread or just view it. One of the most useful parts of the aggregators is the ability to search for posts, or even to view them by categories, although not all aggregators have this option.

However, not all external feeds need an application to view it. A lot of websites today have external feeds built into their pages meaning the user doesn’t need to do anything; they are already on the page. For example iGoogle allows you to add widgets to your iGoogle homepage; these widgets include news feeds directly on to the page. However external feeds don’t necessarily need to be for the users viewing, external feeds are useful when building web applications which require data from another location. For example, I have seen currency converters used around the web that get there conversion rates from an external feed of the current rates which are always kept up to date. This is very useful for the administrator as it would get quite tedious entering all the rates of currency conversion.

I hope this information is useful to anyone, as using external feeds could probably improve the way a lot of us get our news, rather than surfing around the internet looking for a news article you could have it there and waiting for you on your desktop.

In Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) having fresh content uploaded to a website regularly is very important. SEO usually does this in the form of blogs, the most common ways to do this is by using and RSS feed or and ATOM feed. RSS and ATOM are used when a webmaster is frequently updating information to a website. They are used for uploading regular files, such as blogs, news headlines, and audio and video (in standardised format). They are often called feeds, web feeds or channels and include some META data in the coding. In this section of the ‘How to SEO’ manual, we will be comparing RSS feeds to ATOM feeds.

RSS

The RSS feed came before the ATOM feed and really paved the way forward for fast and easy uploads. The RSS feed allows authors to quickly upload content and it also automatically syndicates content. Users can also subscribe to the feeds and the RSS updates the user of any changes automatically.

RSS does have its problems however, it is ‘frozen’, meaning that it must always remain backwards compatible. It is also restricted, as it only supports plain text or escaped HTML (this is very technical)- it essentially means that it is hard to work with in some areas.

ATOM

The ATOM feed is a much more robust way of uploading data to a web page. It also boasts many more features than RSS. ATOM also uses ‘last update’ notifications called Timestamps, this is a really good way of keeping up to date with recent changes.

ATOM can be very complex and complicated regarding the audience of your feed. You must use two different types of data; one for human or one for computer aggregator, this does confuse issues within ATOM.

Between RSS and ATOM, there is no real winner, it is just a matter of personal preference. Both have their ups, and both have their downs.If you want to have a fast, simple and widely used feed, RSS is the one for you. If you prefer a hardier and more feature supporting feed, go for ATOM.