How to easily track blogs and (some) websites

Although many people know how to take advantage of feeds, I think there are also many people that would benefit from knowing a bit about it.

This post is for those who have wondered whether is it possible to track several blogs without having to visit them periodically.

Let's consider the following scenario. Assume you regularly visit some blogs and websites. Some are updated daily, like news websites, but the update frequency of other sites is irregular (new content may be added several times a day, only some days, or every now and then). In such cases, it may often happen to you that you visit a website to notice

• that nothing has changed since your last visit, or
• that you missed some news because you forgot to visit it for a while, or because you didn't expect new postings during the time you was away.

Sometimes, it may also happen that you missed a lot of updates, making it hard to know which contents you haven't read yet. Some of these issues may happen even if you have bookmarked all of your frequently visited websites, and have the habit to visit them regularly.

On the one hand there are cases in which it is a waste of time to visit a site that haven't been updated. On the other hand there are cases in which it is just hard to catch up with the content that you haven't seen yet.

If you struggle with that, then you should use a feed reader.

In its most basic form, a feed is a file that contains recent updates to a site. Many websites, specially those frequently updated, publish one or several feeds in order to make it easy to know in a timely manner what is updated.

A feed reader* is a program that monitors the feeds published on websites, and displays the updates. There are many, many feed readers (they are also known as news readers, or *aggregators). So, the problem is not finding one, but rather one that you will like (here is a list to start with.)

The only thing that you have to do in order to start using a feed reader is to register the feeds you want to monitor. In many cases the reader can even discover the feeds published on a given website.

You can think of it as subscribing yourself (your reader) to a website updates service, but it is much better than that. First of all, it is not a subscription, since you are not registering yourself to the target website, but rather you are registering the website to your reader. Thus, you don't have to provide any personal information (such as email address) in order to get subscribed, and you control your subscriptions from the reader (i.e. you don't have to ask every website to (un)subscribe you).

Secondly, a reader allows you to know about all the updates in one place, whenever you want to. So, using a reader means that you don't have to miss anything, nor pay round visits to many websites, nor visit a website that hasn't been updated.

If your computer is often hooked to the internet, your reader can monitor the feeds on the background, so you don't need to have the reader window active all the time. And if you use a web-based reader, then you don't even need to install anything on your computer, nor to be on-line so the reader can monitor feeds.

Some readers allow you to archive, categorize and share the posts that you read, so that readers double as a useful tool for keeping track of what (you like of what) you read on-line.

If a website doesn't publish its modifications on a feed, it is possible to create a feed outside of the website (which is known as scraping,) and then subscribe to the feed with your feed reader. You can try it at feed43.com.

Feeds are also used for many other things. For example, Flickr publishes a variety of photo feeds. Calendar and organization services (such as remember the milk) generates feeds that can be used to notify about events, important dates, appointments, shopping lists, etc. Feeds can be used to keep people updated about what you are doing (e.g. jaiku,) listening (e.g. last.fm,) studying (e.g. citeulike,) and so on.

A group of feeds can be merged together into only one feed. And in general, feeds can be consumed by many programs (not only feed readers) such as photo displays, calendars, media players (you should try miro), maps, and so on, making them a very practical way to share and combine information that changes frequently. You can try your own feed combinations at Yahoo pipes.

BTW, if you want to monitor this site, simply subscribe to its feed. You can also subscribe to this site comments.