A web feed is a data format used to keep a site’s visitor updated with the latest content. The amount of new sites especially blogs are increasing as days go by and many of the sites are interesting ones which we would like to be up-to-date with their latest content but are we actually able to keep an eye on all these site? I believe the answer to that for most of us would be no as we have a lot to do and we cannot be sitting in front of the computer reading the contents all day long. Many site users do not know the importance or uses of a web feed. This article is written to give a brief information on web feeds and how you can use it to improve your site’s accessibility.

Most sites and blog engines these days comes together with a feed engine in it to syndicate your site’s contents via a web feed. In my own words, a web feed is a protocol that simplifies your site so only the content of your site is shown and nothing else. The benefit of this would be that your potential visitor may read your site’s contents via the feed and the bandwidth needed is lower as the feed is a simplified version of your site, that means that contents such as your sidebar containing advertisements and other images will not show up. Moreover, should your visitor choose to subscribe to your site via the feed, they will be notified when there are updates on your site. E-mail updates are also available through the ever popular FeedBurner by Google. By using e-mail updates, it is sort of like a newsletter and your subscribers will receive an e-mail when there’s a new content up at your site.

The image above shows the feed icon on the navigation toolbar in Mozilla Firefox. As for Internet Explorer 8 users, there’s also a feed icon on the command bar. This is one method to know whether a particular site is syndicating feeds or not. Besides this, most sites these days will publicize their feeds as it is widely used by most people in getting updates of their favourite sites.

As you can see from the above image, this is a typical feed page if you view a site’s feed from Mozilla Firefox. Different web browsers will display the feed differently but the usage is still the same. The feed for my site is configured to show a summary and clicking on the link will bring the visitor to the actual site so it still depends on how you configure it. The concept behind syndicating feeds is to give a simplified version of your site to your visitors, this would be really helpful for mobile users.

If you would like to have your feed page to be more colourful and appealing, I would strongly recommend to use FeedBurner by Google. Not only does it look better but it allows you to monitor your feed and subscribers and best of all, the interface is user-friendly! I believe many site owners are using FeedBurner to handle their syndication and if you are not syndicating, you should do so as well!