An Introduction to Feed Readers (aka Aggregators)

What are Feeds?

The Internet is a huge place. Literally billions of websites, and many of them keep changing day by day, if not minute-by-minute. How do you keep track of the latest things going on the websites / blogs we like? You can't possibly consider going to each and every site and keep hitting the 'refresh' button every now and then, can you?

This is why RSS was introduced. RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is an XML output of the latest changes to a website's content. If the site is a blog, RSS will update itself each time there is a new post. The RSS output is called a feed, which will not contain any of the color information or javascript in the original post, but it will maintain the links. There is another feed standard, called Atom, which is usually shown as a second option when setting up a blog.

All popular blogging platforms such as Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad etc. have feeds, and are turned on by default. Some platforms even have feeds for comments to a particular post. Many forum softwares also provide feeds for latest threads, replies to a particular thread, posts made by particular members etc. There are even search engines which provide feeds to the latest results to search phrases!

How do we read the feeds?

"Ok", you'll say, "there are no more websites to check, but what do we do now? Open the feeds and keep hitting refresh button for the latest changes?!!?" HELL NO. There are dozens of online (web-based) and offline (desktop) softwares called 'Feed Readers'.

NewsOnFeeds.com has a huuuuge list of offline and online feed readers

Feed Readers

If you are using a desktop-based (offline) feed reader, they'll register the feed:// protocol to themselves, which means that (if all goes well) when you click on a link to a feed, the feed URL (usually ends with .xml, some times its a query string such as ?output=rss) will be directly passed to the reader.

In case you are using a web-based reader unsupported by your browser, you'll have to manually copy-paste the feed URL into that site.

Whichever the case, the reader then lets you tag the feed with keywords of your choice, for categorizing. Now, whenever you fire up your offline feed reader (or open/refresh the online reader's page), the reader will check all the feeds for updates, and shows you the content of the latest posts in a neat, single scrollable list.

Most readers let you search posts you have read in the past, star posts for later reference, email a post to your friends etc. Imagine searching all your favorite sites for a post, and you'll see how helpful this can be..

The good thing about online feed readers is that there is no installation to be done, which means you can use the site from public cafes or at a friend's computer, without changing anything. Just sign-in, and your own Personalized Newspaper is right there waiting for you.

Some bloggers / websites prefer to share only a portion of their posts via feeds, so that a feed subscriber who reads the summary (first few lines) of the post (or some times just the post title - as decided by the blogger), and finds it interesting, will visit the original site and see / click their ads. Oh I forgot to mention - feeds by default don't have ads - unless they are manually put in by the content owner.

Google Reader is the most popular feed reader worldwide. Head over to the site, and if you are not a user yet, they'll give you a quick intro as well.

How do I know whether my favorite site has feeds?

Sites with feeds usually display the orange feed icon (See FeedIcons.com for multi-sized samples), clicking on which you'll see the feed for the site. Some blogs show a list of feed readers, each with dedicated buttons which let you subscribe to their posts via specific readers in one click.

Browser support

Modern Browsers (Opera 9, Firefox 2 & IE7 do, I'm not sure about older versions.) will display the icon at the right end of the address-bar itself. Click on the icon to see a preview of the current feed listings.

If you are using Firefox 2.0 or above, it will show you a list of supported readers, from which you can set one as default, if you want. I've chosen Google as the option, which means that each time I click on a feed icon, a page asking me to choose either iGoogle or Google Reader shows up.

Latest versions of IE, Firefox & Opera have inbuilt feed readers, albeit simple ones. (Firefox's reader is called Live Bookmarks)

Feed-related Services

FeedBurner (now owned by Google) helps you monetize your feeds, as well as provide a permanent feed URL. You'll be able to change blog platforms without changing your feed URL. My feedburner URL, for example, is feed://feeds.feedburner.com/liveash/blog (the part after .com is customizable.) The monetizing part comes only after you have about 50,000 subscribers, so don't expect to make a quick buck just yet!

Yahoo Pipes is a bit more complicated service; it lets you create mashups of feeds. That is, you can combine different feeds programmatically (with if/else , for/while loops and much more) to create a customized feed.

List of Geek Feeds

To help you get started, here are a few (geeky) feed URLs which I have subscribed to:

• Digg / Technology > http://www.digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml
• Digital Inspiration (Famous Indian Blogger, Amit Agarwal) > http://feeds.feedburner.com/labnol
• GigaOm / Web (Om Mallik, a US-centric Indian Tech Blogger) > http://feeds.feedburner.com/gigaom/software
• Google Blogoscoped (All things Google, and then some!) > http://blogoscoped.com/rss.xml
• Guardian Unlimited: Technology blog > http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/index.xml
• TechCrunch (Michael Arrington, one of the most respected tech bloggers, posts here) > http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch
• Lifehacker - They cover a lot of topics, so you better go to http://lifehacker.com/about/#5 and choose a feed that suits your needs. They provide multiple feeds for each tag, for each author etc.
• Official Google Blog > http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
• Mashable! (A bit too geeky, newcomer) > http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mashable

'Firefox Kid' - The Blake Ross Story..

This is an excerpt from an article about Blake Ross, a 20 yr. old developer who played a key role in the development of the Mozilla Firefox Browser. It gives a peek into Blake's view of Firefox's Birth.

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To understand where Blake Ross is going (...), you have to understand where he’s been. As part of the first generation to grow up with the Internet, Ross discovered early how geek culture was conspiring against his parents. Although his mom, a psychologist, and his dad, a lawyer, hold graduate degrees, they were stymied when they tried to do just about anything online. Ross recalls his mother frequently yelling across the house to him, asking for tech support. She couldn’t find her Internet Explorer bookmarks. She was getting besieged with pop-up ads. She didn’t know how to protect herself from viruses.

While his peers might relish such power over their parents, Ross is squeakily earnest and really wanted to help out. So he went off to slay the dragons haunting the Internet. Late into the night, he sat under his shelves of Archie toys and taught himself to code, first HTML, the Web programming language, and then Microsoft Visual Basic, a popular tool for creating simple applications. Even back then, Ross made a habit of keeping his family and friends in the dark. “I don’t like telling people what I’m doing until I have something to show them,” he says.

“My friends would say, ‘How can you leave him in his bedroom for so many hours?’” his mother, Abby, recalls. “We didn’t know what was going on in there.” When their son would request programming books for his birthday, they began to get an idea. “Everyone started to tell me he was going to be the next Bill Gates,” Abby says. In fact, the young Ross had another target in mind: Netscape’s embattled Mozilla browser. Netscape had ushered in the dot-com era, but by 1998 its pioneering browser had been almost completely superseded by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. So that year the company made the bold—or desperate—move of releasing the code for its software to the world of open source. “It was a way to touch a product used by a couple million people,” Ross says. And it was something that could help his mom.

After many long nights online, Ross became well enough known in the Mozilla community to get offered a position with Netscape (by then owned by AOL). Yet when the 15-year-old Florida native, accompanied by his mom, arrived at the Silicon Valley office in 2000, he was less than impressed. “It was the bloody remains of battle,” Ross says. “I didn’t feel like anyone in management thought we had a chance of winning this thing.”

But there were others in the cubicle trenches who hadn’t conceded the browser war to Microsoft. Late one night in the summer of 2002, at a nearby Denny’s restaurant, Ross fell into an impassioned discussion with Dave Hyatt, a senior engineer at Netscape who shared his vision for a leaner but more flexible browser for the masses. Rather than starting from scratch, the two took the Mozilla browser, which they thought was bloated with super­fluous features such as chat rooms and an e-mail client, and began stripping it to the bare essentials. They felt they were raising the Netscape browser from the ashes and so named their stripped-down version Phoenix. But the rebel project became anathema to some Mozilla diehards. “I don’t see the need for Phoenix,” posted one detractor at the time. Another was more succinct: “Phoenix sucks,” he blogged.

Enrolling in Stanford for the fall of 2002, Ross decided to have a go at being an ordinary college kid. He lifted weights. He started dating. He discovered the rock band Coldplay. But his geek legacy was also alive and well. Before long, his vision of a lean mean Web browser caught on in a major way. Phoenix—later named Firebird, then Firefox—gathered momentum. Ben Goodger, a 23-year-old engineer from New Zealand, had been shepherding it along with the growing support of other open-source enthusiasts. Chris Messina, a 22-year-old programmer who was a key player in the development of Deanspace, the influential Web site Howard Dean used to attract support for his bid at the Democratic nomination, joined the Firefox team for the same reasons. “It was all about empowering people through technology,” he says.

Drawing on the viral marketing strategies of the Dean campaign, legions rallied behind the alternative browser. They got a snappy logo, an Earth-hugging fox, and they launched a community hub called SpreadFirefox. Supporters around the world posted digital photos of their efforts at guerrilla marketing. They dropped a Firefox banner on the Danish Parliament building in Copenhagen, carried “Get Firefox” placards at an anti-Bush rally in London, plastered posters around Taiwan. In a mere 10 days, they raised US $200 000 to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times.

Firefox went prime time in June 2005, after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a warning about the “vulnerability” of Internet Explorer and suggested using alternative browsers. Even Slate magazine, owned by Microsoft, threw in the towel. “I’ve been using [Firefox] for a week now,” trumpeted a Slate scribe, “and I’ve all but forgotten about Explorer.”

The success of Firefox put the spotlight on Ross, whose young age and puckish charm made him a media icon—much to the consternation of Ross and the open-source community. But Ross’s ability to articulate Firefox’s goals and challenges in his blog earned him a following. He was a coder who could talk the talk. And people listened. Soon even members of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team sought Ross out. One night after he addressed a Silicon Valley technology group, they invited him for dinner. “I thought they were going to take me out in the parking lot and beat the crap out of me,” Ross says. Instead, they gave him a company sweatshirt with the Explorer’s familiar “e” icon grafted under the bones of a Jolly Roger. It was tongue-in-cheek but symbolic nonetheless. Ross had raided their kingdom.

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Read the full article @ IEEE Spectrum Website

Mozilla Firefox - 100 MILLION DOWNLOADS!!!

Finally, Mozilla Firefox has crossed the 100 Million Downloads barrier, and is blasting off into cyberspace for more!!

Go to SpreadFirefox.com to join the festivities!!!

Mozilla Firefox (originally known as "Phoenix" and briefly as "Mozilla Firebird") is a free, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and hundreds of volunteers . Before its 1.0 release on November 9, 2004, Firefox had already gained acclaim from numerous media outlets, including Forbes and the Wall Street Journal .

With over 25 million downloads in the 99 days after its release, Firefox became one of the most used free and open source applications, especially among home users . On October 19, 2005 at 17:13:40 UTC, Firefox had its 100 millionth download, just 344 days after the release of version 1.0.