Feeds

What is the point?

Feeds allow you to keep up with blogs, news sites, weather reports, friends' photos, changes to your wiki, etc. without having to visit all those separate sites.

A "feed reader" program or site collects all those stories, blog posts, updates, etc. for you to read when you want to read them.

It can do this because feeds are XML-based, so computers have a standard way of handling the data.

RSS or Atom?

There are two main "flavors" of internet feeds: RSS (for "Really Simple Syndication" (among other things)) and Atom.

For the purposes of this discussion, you don't need to distinguish between them. Think of them both as "feeds."