A feed, also known as RSS, is a stream of posts or comments which is kept up-to-date when new content is generated. This is very helpful as it gives people permission to keep track your blog, together with many other websites they have interest in, and aggregate them together thru a lot of applications known as feed readers (such as RSSOwl or the WordPress.com Reader). This is specifically usefull to keep track of recently published content from various blogs and websites without visiting them. Each WP blog has many feeds. However, the chief content feed can be accessed by inserting /feed/ to the URL of your blog.
Here is the feed of the official WordPress.com blog: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/feed/
Your feeds are generated automatically if you do not mark your blog as private. The password-protected posts’ content will definitely not be shown in your blog’s feed.
In this guide, we will take a look at What are the most outstanding benefits of Feeds to help you know more deeply about this topic.
What are the most outstanding benefits of Feeds
Benefits of Feeds
There are many advantages of using Feeds, here are some of them:
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If you have 15 friends who have blogs, then you may need to visit each blog of those to view any updated content. If you have a feed reader, it can check those 10 blogs every hour (or whenever you want, it's up to you), let you be aware of when new content has been updated, and provide you with the new content.
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If you are on slower internet connection, you do not have to visit various blogs and individually load all of their information. Your reader will deliver only the latest content to you.
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You are able to have constant searches. When you go to the web-based blog aggregators you are allowed to search right inside their feeds. Let’s say you have an interest in ‘McDonald's’. You could search for that – and the results page will have a feed. If you load that feed into your reader then you will have a constant search for ‘Dr Pepper's’ at that site. Moreover, you can usually set up a reader to watch for words in all the feeds it gets too.
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If your feed reader provides archiving functionality, you can easily save data for future use. For instance, if you read something in a feed and, a few days later, you need that article again, your feed reader had better be able to locate it.
Subscribing to Feeds
Subscribing to a feed is considered very simple and only requires a feed reader. Nearly all browsers already have the ability to read feeds, as can many email clients. In addition, you can also download special desktop clients for this purpose, and other websites even provide services of feed reading.
If prompted to enter an address for a feed you had better insert the URL of the website you want to follow. Most readers will automatically detect the feed, but, if not sure, add /feed/ to the end of the URL. On top of that, WordPress.com Reader is a free web-based feed reader and you can subscribe to feeds using WordPress.com Reader. However, the reader you use entirely in your call, and the process of subscribing will be different for individual.
Categories of Feeds
There are some different types of feeds that you may wish to know – there is RSS .92, RSS 2.0, Atom .3, Atom 1. In fact, it does not really matter although someone who has a technical may interest in feeds may state otherwise. But if you are the average user, don’t worry about it.
Your Feeds
The examples listed below are those feeds from the Official WordPress.com Blog. Please replace en.blog.wordpress.com with your own domain to use these with your own blog.
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Main Content: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/feed/
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Category: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/category/features/feed/ (“Features” is the category.)
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Tag: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/tag/themes/feed/ (“Themes” is the tag.)
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Authors: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/author/matt/feed/ (“matt” is the username of the author.)
If you desire to get the Atom version of any of these feeds above, just add /atom/ to the end of the URLs.
In case there is a specific post that catches your eye, you can subscribe to its comments by inserting /feed/ to the end of its URL. Here is the example: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/street-photography/feed/
Conclusion
Thank you for reading! To keep you WP blog's feed settings under control, you are able to use various options contained by going to Settings -> Reading.
