Web Feeds
Help
What is the meaning of the little orange icon?
The orange square with white radio waves (
) is the de facto industry standard symbol to
signify a Web feed. Other feed icons that are sometimes used by Web
sites which publish Web feeds are ones that feature the letters
or
.
What are Web feeds?
Put simply, Web feeds are special Web pages where the information is formatted to be read by computers instead of people. The information in these pages is structured in a way that usually resembles a list of news headlines, similar to news tickers which crawl along the bottom the screen during some news programs on television. One of the biggest benefits is that when you use a computer program that can read Web feeds, the program can grab new items without you needing to visit the Web site.
How can I start using Web feeds?
There are several ways in which you can start using Web feeds. All of them involve getting your hands on something called a "feed reader". There are many different types of these readers, some of which are already built-in to modern Web browsers, and others which are downloadable stand-alone computer programs.
We recommend that you use a modern Web browser which has a feed reader built-in. Two examples are Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (here at the ECE department, we recommend Mozilla Firefox).
Once you have obtained a program that has a feed reader, all you have to do is to decide which Web feeds you want to start receiving. This is known as subscribing to a feed. Firefox refers to feeds as "Live Bookmarks", since the feeds show up within the Bookmarks list in the Firefox browser. Internet Explorer 7 holds your feed subscriptions in the "Favorites" section.