This article will help beginners understand a few “feed” essentials: what they are, how they work, and how to use them..

So you are a little new to the Web. As you surf around, you keep noticing these little orange squares and multicolored boxes placed next to phrases such as these:

• Subscribe via RSS
• Subscribe via XML
• Subscribe via Atom
• Subscribe via Feedburner
• Subscribe to My Feed
• Subscribe to Main Content
• Subscribe to Comments

..and so on. Although these invitations to “subscribe” come in many flavors, they are all basically doing the same thing: enabling visitors to receive information from the site without having to manually visit the site itself. By subscribing to your favorite sites, you can stay current with updated content delivered to the “feed reader” of your choice. There are many feed readers freely available around the Web. In many cases, you can even have feed subscriptions delivered directly to your email account. We’ll talk more about different types of feed readers here in a bit. For now, let’s examine a few different types of feeds and how they might be used.

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