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watje
about trance
The orange XML button explained, or why every site should have an RSS feed.
You might have been wondering what that little XML button is. If you already tried to click on it you might have seen something you thought was just gibberish, while actually you saw the RSS feed of this weblog. RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a way to represent the exact same news that you see on the front page in a computer readable XML file.
While at first you might be more interested in a version that you can easily read yourself, the power of this format is that you can use a wealth of utilities to translate my weblog into pretty much any form you like. You can also aggregate a number of news sources into one easy news page on your desktop. For instance below is a screenshot of how the feeds I subscribe to look on my own computer, rendered with Radio:
Only the BoingBoing weblog is shown, but if you scroll you'd see the latest entries of the other weblogs I'm subscribed to.
If you're looking for a free RSS reader without weblogging and all kinds of bells and whistles I can recommend SharpReader for Windows (although you will need to install the .NET runtimes).
© 2003 Peter Backx
Last Update: 29/06/2003; 22:43:47
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