How to get started with Web Feeds

If you are new to Web Feeds this page will show you how to get started properly with YONC. The following will take you through a basic introduction of Web Feeds in general as well as letting you know how to obtain feeds that suits you.

RSS and Atom

Basically, RSS and Atom are two similar formats for delivery of dynamic web content. Many people will describe them as a “news feed” that you subscribe to. As a subscription you can think of it like you’re subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you periodically, but instead of ending up in your physical mailbox when the new issue of the magazine is published, it is continually distributed to a “news feed” that you can “read” whenever you want.

How can YONC support me in this?

With Web Feeds growing extremely popular in the last couple of years you are likely to get an overflow of information. Since the feed technology is so simple and free, people who are starting to see the potential might end up subscribing to way too many feeds. YONC has a clever solution for this. Basically it lets you save your feeds in feed groups and put filters on them, making only feed items matching your filter visible to you. Of course YONC also serves a purpose for users with a lesser pool of subscribed feeds.

Where can I find feeds containing information relevant for me?

There are several ways to obtain the information you want. Below you will be introduced to some services offering search functionality, which in combination with the filter on your feed groups in your YONC client should yield very accurate results.

How to get started?

Lets say you have a passion for football (soccer), specifically the English club Liverpool FC. You aren’t necessarily familiar with all the available Liverpool fan-sites or blogs out there, but you would still like to have a feed group for this category in your YONC client.

Twitter

Category: Micro-blogs

Twitter is a good tool for creating feeds. If you go to Liverpool FC’s Twitter page you can see that Twitter has an RSS feed “converter” located below the followers in the right column. Click on this and put the URL as a feed location into your YONC client.
You can also go to http://search.twitter.com and search for “Liverpool FC” which will display all recent tweets containing the given keywords as a result. The result can be shown as a feed by clicking on the RSS feed link at the top of the right column.

Twingly

Category: Blogs

Twingly is another good tool for this. Like the above, input your wanted keywords in the search engine, find the “show as RSS” link to the far-right when the results are displayed and copy into YONC client. The great thing about Twingly compared to many other services is that it supports full text search. Twingly will look for hits in entire articles and not just in the headlines and leads.

PostRank

Category: Feed Library

PostRank is a web-page on which you can search for feed sources. Type in keywords in the search field at the top of the page and this service will suggest different sources containing those specific keywords to you. PostRank also has a popular-topics section.
Note: Unless you type the exact name of a feed source in the search field, do not press enter after you typed in your keywords. You have to select source from the automated drop-down menu or your search result will be empty.

BoardReader

Category: Forums

BoardReader is a forum search engine. Input your wanted keywords and press the search button. The result can be shown as either an RSS or ATOM feed by clicking on the corresponding icon in the top-right.

Google News

Category: News and Articles

Google News is yet another good tool for feed gathering. Go to http://news.google.com and search for “Liverpool FC” or a phrase of your choice. When the results of your search is displayed to you, click on the RSS icon in the left column. This will show the result of your search as an RSS feed. Google News supports full text search.

Google News is using dynamic URLs for its feed items. When YONC wants to check feed items from Google News for updates, it has to do a new search which causes Google News to create new URLs for already existing feed items. Over time this is likely to result in large quantities of duplicate feed items as YONC interprets different URLs as unique occurrences, regardless of the identical content on the pages they link to.
The YONC team is working on a solution for this issue.