Receiving Update Notifications

The 816pine.com website uses syndication feeds to provide notification of updates to the site. This page will briefly introduce you to syndication feeds and explain how to use them to receive update notifications of, not just 816pine.com but many other sites that use the same technology.

Website Syndication, often called “website feeds,” or just “feeds” is a standard way, by which many websites provide up-to-date synopses of their content. This can be very useful to someone who wants to monitor many sites for updates without having to navigate to each site in a browser regularly.

Sites provide access to their feeds via URLs just like web page URLs. The feed URLs may be identified as RSS or Atom feeds. Once you have the URL, you can plug it into a feed reader (sometimes called news aggregators).

There are many different readers and step-by-step instructions on setting them up will vary greatly depending on the reader. Often email clients can be news aggregators, although many times a separate plugin (sometimes called add-in or extension) is required. Thunderbird is an email application that supports news aggregation out of the box. Outlook and Outlook express will require an add-in called RSS Popper. Here are instructions for installing RSS Popper for those that use Outlook Express.

The feed URL for 816pine.com is:

http://www.816pine.com/feed/

All news aggregators use URLs like the one above to identify the news feeds. Each is slightly different in how you add the URL to your list of feeds, but for the most part should be pretty straightforward.

There are even personalized homepages provided by several companies which allow you to put news feeds on the home page of your browser. Google provides one, there is another called netvibes. You can use these as your home page and they will also display updates to your feeds. Firefox allows you to add “live bookmarks” which are just news feeds.

Feeds are a very useful way to keep updated. You can get a feed for your favorite news sites, blogs, or almost any other site featuring frequently-changing information.