Subscription Help

XML Syndication Help Page

THE BASICS

So wtf is all this XML Syndication / RSS / ATOM / news aggregators / news feed readers / feedburner crap? Well, RSS (or, really simple syndication) is essentially a way to deliver news and other info directly to you, without having to connect to a website. For instance, every time we post something, it can automatically arrive in your e-mail inbox! Or, you receive our posts in a “news reader” (aka news aggregator). News readers connect to our RSS feed to see if anything new has been posted (the news readers usually check every hour, but you can increase that time on some clients), and if there is a new post it will automatically download it to your news reader (or send it to an email address). Some popular news readers include My Yahoo (integrates with the new Yahoo E-Mail BETA), FireFox Live Bookmarks (built into FireFox), Bloglines (web based news reader), and Feed Reader (standalone news reader). My Yahoo and Bloglines are handy because they store your RSS feeds online, so you can access them anywhere.

There are several competing versions of XML syndication, but we won’t bore you with the details. Nature’s Graffiti uses the RSS 2.0 standard.

E-MAIL SUBSCRIPTION

We use a service called Feed Burner to deliver our RSS feed to e-mail addresses (in fact, you can have any RSS feed delivered to your email inbox using Feed Burner, and it’s free). If you’d like to receive an email every time we post something , simply enter it into the form on the right. We respect your privacy, take a look at our privacy policy, FeedBurner also respects your privacy (view Feed Burner’s privacy policy)

RSS SUBSCRIPTION - USING RSS CAPABLE WEB BROWSERS

Every page at Nature’s Graffiti has an “auto discovery” link to our RSS feed, which means if you are viewing our web page with an RSS capable browser (like Firefox or IE7), then you can subscribe to our RSS feed very easily. If you use Firefox, in the upper right corner look for an orange icon that looks like , click it, and you can add it to any of your bookmark folders!

RSS SUBSCRIPTION - USING RSS READERS

Simply add a new feed in your favorite news reader using our RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/naturesgraffiti

On the right side of our homepage, if you scroll we have links to add our feed to 10 popular web-based news readers. Click any of them to add it to your feed list. Never heard of any of them? Try one out! Our favorite is Bloglines, we use it to read the news everyday!

FURTHER HELP WITH XML SYNDICATION

If you have more questions about XML syndication, Yahoo has a great RSS help page, NPR has a great XML tutorial / help site, and if you want to add RSS to your website Wikipedia’s RSS article is a good place to start.