New to ajaban zabAn?

Getting Updates with Atom or RSS

Help •
by Rezwan on 12/15 at 03:53 PM
Printer Friendly

Tired of visiting web sites to find nothing new? Want to receive regular updates of all new stories, articles and reviews straight to your desktop? If so then RSS or Atom are for you. But what are they? And how do you use them?

ajabanzabAn.com is designed to deliver notifications of all new material to RSS or Atom readers. RSS or Atom readers scan our site and notify you when new items appear or when old items are updated. They also store these items for you to read at your leisure. Many web sites have adopted this technology including the New York Times and the BBC. Instead of visiting every single web site, simply open your RSS or Atom reader and it does all the checking for you.

How to Use RSS and Atom:

You may have noticed that just clicking the RSS or Atom link wasn’t very helpful. This is because you need two things: an RSS or Atom reader (see below) and one or more RSS feeds (see our lists of feeds below).

Readers

To get a reader, simply download one (It’s free!), install the program and subscribe to the deeds you would like to be notified about.

Free RSS Readers We like (Pick one today!):
- Sage (Firefox Browsers)
- SharpReader (Windows)
- NetNewsWire Lite (Mac OS X)
- Bloglines (Web based)

For more options see:
- Google directory
- About.com guide

More resources:
- Lockergnome RSS Quickstart guide
- Sitepoint: Get Off Your RSS!
- Feedburner

RSS and Atom Feeds

Once you have your reader, you need to follow their directions to add our site. With Sage, for example, you right click on the RSS link, then select “Bookmark” and then select “Sage Feeds”. Other readers may want an url pasted in.

Throughout our site, we have an RSS 2.0 and an Atom link. These links provide the feed for the whole site. If you would like to just get updates on one section of the site, you can subscribe to each of our feeds individually below:

Products Blog: RSS 2.0 : : Atom
Language Blog: RSS 2.0 : : Atom
Culture Blog: RSS 2.0 : : Atom
Ecology Blog: RSS 2.0 : : Atom
About Blog: RSS 2.0 : : Atom

If you want several, you can try grouping them in a folder if your RSS reader supports that.

OR you can combine them using a pipe ‘|’ character, especially for the readers that have you paste in an url. What does that mean? Here’s an example. The url for the Atom “Language” blog feed ends in .../site/atom/language. Say you wanted to get the Language news, and also the content from the “Culture” blog. You would then change the ending of the url to: .../site/atom/language|culture - and if you wanted “products” as well, it would be: .../site/atom/language|culture|products

(1) Comments • • Permalink• Tell-a-Friend