Publishing a Feed

If you're taken by the convenience and power of being able to deliver information regularly right to the screens of anyone who's interested, you might want to publish your own feed. The good news is, it's surprisingly easy.

We make blogging tools here at Six Apart, which let any person or organization easily share their ideas with their friends, family, coworkers, peers, or the world at large. All of our tools, such as Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox, publish feeds automatically, without you having to set up anything. If you're interested, you can find out which tool is right for you.

Subscribing to Feeds

Once you've got a tool to read feeds, you'll want to find some feeds worth reading. Many of the tools listed above provide some built-in feeds to get you started. Then, as you visit other sites on the web, you can keep your eyes open for links that say XML or RSS or Syndication, or for that orange button up above, and add the feeds you find interesting.

What Feed Reader Should I Use?

Here's a list some of the most popular tools our customers have told us they like.

On the web: If you don't want to have to install a program, many people choose My Yahoo!, Google Personalized Homepage, My MSN, or My AOL to read feeds right within the home page that their browser starts in. Other providers of web-based feed readers include Rojo. Bloglines, Attensa Online, or NewsGator Online. All of the web-based services are free. Also free is our own service, LiveJournal, which is a blogging community that also lets you read feeds on your friends page.

On your computer: If you want a feed reading program that runs on your own computer, there are a few options. Anyone using the Mozilla Firefox web browser has support for feeds built-in, and Microsoft Windows users have support for feeds in Internet Explorer 7. Apple Macintosh users can also use the built-in support for feeds in the Safari web browser.

If you want a separate program to read feeds, you can use FeedDemon or NewsGator for Microsoft Outlook or Attensa for Outlook if you're on Microsoft Windows. Both tools let you switch between these programs and the web-based reader at any time. If you're on a Macintosh running OS X, the most popular feed reader is NetNewsWire, which can also connect to the web-based services.

About Feeds

Many websites have links labeled "XML" or "RSS" or "Atom". All of these are ways of saying that you can find out about updates to that site without having to visit the site in your web browser.

This feature is referred to as "syndication" or "aggregation". Sometimes it's just called subscribing. And these days, instead of one of these words, lots of sites will use a little orange button.

Promote your RSS feed with RSS Submit!

RSS Submit will quickly and automatically submit your RSS feed to most of existing RSS directories. Currently, RSS Submit is the most reliable and popular tool for promoting your RSS feeds.

It is amazingly easy to work with RSS Submit. Actually everything you need to do is to specify a link to the RSS feed and click the 'Submit' button! Due to the built-in feed detection tool, you can enter only the domain of your site. Besides, the program will fill out all necessary fields and check your RSS feed for errors.
RSS Submit supports all existing types of RSS directories. The directory database is regularly updated to make the submission effect as prominent as possible. RSS Submit requires practically no attention from the user. Due to the high quality site database and thought-out engine, RSS feeds are submitted completely automatically. If you want to increase the popularity of your RSS feed several times and improve its positions in search engines