Feed me

Exploring Feed Aggregators.

It appears that Feed aggregators fall into three categories:  Desktop, Browser, and Mail client.

Oh yeah, What are Feeds?  Not the type of food one would feed to an animal for nourishment either.  Feeds are a way of subscribing to something such as a website via its URL.  So if you wanted to get updates on a single list from all of your favorite websites, blogs, and news reels you could subsribe to the relevant sites or pull the feed URL and input them into your Feed Aggregator.

Make sense yet?  Maybe not.  Check out the list of Blogs that I follow off to the right margin of this blog site.  Notice how they dynamically change over time and add new items to the top of the list?  This is a Feed Aggregator that Blogger provides as an out of the box widget to add onto this blog.

Using a single Feed Aggregator would allow you to pull all of the recent articles, posts, comments, and so on from all of your favorite sites and put them on a single viewable and clickable page.  This creates an efficient alternative without having to surf to all of your favorite sites everyday.

A couple of the Feed Aggregators to check out are:  FeedDemon & RSS Owl  and then of course your browser most likely has this type of functionality as well.