RSS

Say you have learned how to subscribe to RSS feeds using a feed reader, or an email account. You are ready to create your own RSS feeds.

A post is like an atom, and a feed a molecule. You can be a chemist to create your own molecules by discovering ways to form feeds. Here is the basic chemistry of posts.

Atoms

Almost all articles in the New York Times are free online, for about a week, and then go behind the pay wall. However, NYT permits readers to generate permanent links to individual articles. Here is a link generator created by Aaron Swartz. Paste the URL of an NYT article into the box, and click "Go". You will see a the URL of the permanent link to the article. You should use this permanent link in your blog posts.

I subscribed to the RSS of iMechanica and somebody’s blog in my RSS reader--netvibes. But it feed me a little. Today’s hot topic is Huang’s “from students’ perspective”, and lots of comments follow and will continue to follow tomorrow or the days after tomorrow. When I check my netvibes, it only tells me new topics, but not new comments. But actually, sometimes we want to track the update of several specific topics instead of browsing every topic. Moreover, someone posts new comments on some topics, but I cannot obtain the feed of comments from him/her. So if iMechanica can supply feed for the topics and for all of the updated posts of users, it will be very useful. It improves the efficiency and it is the gist of RSS.

What is RSS feed?
Really Simple Syndication, better known as RSS feed, updates posts and comments on your computer. To read RSS feeds, you will need to set up a feed reader, such as Google Reader.

Sample iMechanica feeds:

• Front page, rss.xml
• All comments, crss

You can also create your own feeds of iMechanica.

Other useful feeds: