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Well today I am writing one technical-gyaan article for you guys which will not let you get some good marks in CAT, but will help you in your daily knowledge management. Many of you must have noticed few images of google, yahoo etc in the right sidebar of this page, and RSS for entries on top of this page. So in order to increase your knowledge I’ll write in order.

1) FEEDS/RSS

In a nutshell it is the dynamic (which gets created on its own) file which contains the updated content of your site. These feeds are only read by any feed reader/aggregator just like an epub can be read by Kindle. If you don’t know about kindle and epub, then no worries here are the following pages where you can do more research:

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Though RSS is a subset of Feeds but here my motive is not tell you the technical difference but to make sure that you never gets embarrassed when somebody asks you about your feeds/subscriptions.

Take note of the image in the Resource box. This image is used more often by any site which provides its feeds. So feed is an update to read which you do not need a mailbox but an aggregator/feedreader. Well feeds got invented as people didn’t want to give their email addresses and they did not want to visit every site daily.

Well have a look to this video in which Chris has explained what is RSS. This will help you more in understanding RSS.

2) FeedReader:

When you are creating feeds, then obviously you need one tool to read it. So feedreader is the tool whose purpose it to read the feeds/rss. Though there are large number of feedreaders in market but I have few favorites. Here are my favorite:

Desktop Feedreaders:

1) FeedDemon (My favorite. I use this application only)

2)FeedReader

Online Feedreaders:

1) Google Reader

2) Netvibes

3) Bloglines

Resources:

Full list of Aggregators/FeedReaders

Comparison of Online Feedreaders

Setup your Feeds:

I want you to follow a safer journey in feedreading i.e you should maintain an online feedreading account which should be linked to a desktop application so that you can read your feeds online as well as offline. By following this route you also get rid of the risk of loss of your feedlist once your windows gets crashed. After all we are the people who do not want to be dependent on our PC for our data. So, I am making a small assumption and that is all of you own at-least one gmail account, if not then create one. Now:

a) Type “Google Reader” in google and press the first link in the result.

b) Login with your google account

c) Enter the site name or feed url (get when you click on the feed button/logo on any site) in the box appeared when you will click “Add Subscription” which is Yin the top left position of the webpage as shown in the figure.

5) Now download Feeddemon. Here is the download page of feeddemon: http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/feeddemon/ .

Remember: Feeddemon is an open source tool so even if you are working on an office computer, there’s no harm in installing this tool.

6) After installation you can import your feeds either from google reader or from an OPML file. OPML file is generated when you export your list of feeds from any feedreading tool. Well you need to just enter your google username and password to sync your feeddemon with google reader. I like Feeddemon due to the feature of whether I read my feeds on feeddemon or on google reader the reading status automatically gets updated on its own on both the applications.

Click to enlarge

7) You are good to go now. Your feeddemon application will looks like this.

Click to enlarge

Now I hope I have been able to atleast remove some of your doubt about feeds and feedreaders. I haven’t talked about rest of the feedreaders as it is out of the scope of this article. There is one major reason of writing this post and that is majority(more than 90%) of our users are subscribing it through email subscriptions, so I have decided to show them a new and better route. Kids are still naive for feeds, rss, and feedreader, and this article will give some idea about this new(not for everyone) technology.

Note: I have tried to cover the major aspect of feeds and feedreading but covering every aspect in one single article is out of the scope of this article. So if you have any specific query, then I am ready to lend my ears. Just comment below.

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I am the founder of this site. I started this site with a single motive of providing MBA aspirants every knowledge or material which they cannot easily get on Internet. My strength is my Technical Gyaan in combination with all the Gyaan I acquire by preparing for IIMs....