RSS and Atom feeds offer you a simple way to keep up with the latest information hosted on developerWorks. developerWorks offers you two ways to sign up for feeds: pre-defined feeds (below) and custom feeds that you define yourself. You can also use feeds to bring developerWorks content directly to your desktop.

• Learn more about feeds

  Really Simple Syndication (RSS) files are standard XML-based files that provide a means for syndicating and aggregating web content. The files contain metadata commonly used to provide descriptive information about the content, context, and characteristics of data. Using RSS files, a data feed can be created that supplies headlines, links, and article summaries from a web site. These files describe a channel of information that can include a logo, a site link, an input box, and multiple news items. Other websites can incorporate this information into their pages automatically or use the feeds to provide a site with current news headlines. These techniques allow distribution of up-to-date information for any given website.

  The Atom format is also text-based XML and is similar to RSS. Atom was developed to improve upon RSS and can offer you more flexibility in the presentation and maintainability of your feeds.

  The HTML format is an easy way to display RSS feeds on your website without using a feed reader. You can specify the parameters for the type and amount of content you want, and the HTML code is put together and displayed for you. You can copy and paste the HTML code right into your own web page. Once you have the code, you can easily update the code to change the parameters or customize the presentation of the content. If you like to have flexibility in displaying new content on your website, HTML is for you.

  Dig deeper with these resources:

  • Learn more about RSS feeds and how to use them.
  • For a very quick overview of how RSS feeds make it easy to keep up with what's new on the sites you regularly visit, read this short blog post on Keeping up with feeds.
  • Check out this "Introduction to Syndication, (RSS) Really Simple Syndication" article, which describes what feed readers are available and which one might fit your needs.
  • Learn how to grab headlines from a remote RSS file to retrieve syndicated content, transform it, and display the result.
  • You can get more information about RSS from the concise FAQ from PC World.
  • Get information on Atom feeds in the article "An overview of the Atom 1.0 Syndication Format," which discusses Atom's technical strengths relative to other syndication formats, and offers several compelling use case examples that illustrate those strengths.
  • Learn more about how the HTML format works in this demo from developerWorks.