Atom, RSS, and Syndication Feeds
Where can I find out more about syndication and XML feeds?
There are a variety of places on the web with good information. A particularly friendly introduction is the online New York Times article,
Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information.
When I click on a link for a feed from the site, all I get is gibberish or a non-formatted web page. What am I doing wrong?
- The feeds are XML, not HTML. Depending on your system, you may be looking at a raw feed in a browser that is not equipped for displaying the feed. For example, Safari 2.x can read the XML feeds and present them nicely, while Safari 1.x cannot (it only renders HTML).
- To leverage the power of the XML feeds you will benefit by using a dedicated Feed reader. I believe there a couple of recommended Feed readers already mentioned in the FAQ below.
Do you have any recommendations for syndications readers?
- NetNewsWire: The pay-for version costs $39 (and worth every dime if you're into RSS), but the free version, NetNewsWire Lite, can be found if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. (For OS X)
- FeedDemon: Another pay-for RSS newsreader ($29.95), but also worth every dime if you need a Windows-based reader. Super-clean design and frequently updated. (For Windows)
- Akregator: The only real RSS newsreader for Linux (don't even bother with Straw or any of those headline scrollers), it's only drawback is that you need a really recent version of KDE (and the devel packages) in order to get it to compile. (For Linux)
- BlogLines: Bloglines is a web-based RSS reader; dunno how well it works with private feeds such as ours, but it's free. If you set up your c74 dev blog subscriptions here, just make sure you don't share them or make them public in anyway, as the feed URLs contain embedded http authentication information.
- There are many others, with new ones coming out all the time. Let us know if you have a reader that you think should be listed here!
Why can't I get the Atom feeds from cycling74.com to display in NetNewsWire?
Our feeds use Atom version 1.0 for syndicating content. To view our feeds with NetNewsWire, you will need to update to NetNewsWire version 2.0.1.
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