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Feeds

Contents 1 Overview 2 How are feeds used in Rhub? 2.1 Subscribing 2.2 Publishing

[edit] Overview

Feeds are, quite simply, a list of items. Items are like email: they normally have a date, subject, author and body. Feeds can be used for many things, such as photographs, news articles, music and messages. There are a few different technical types of feeds, such as RSS or Atom, but you normally don't have to worry about that.

Feeds are normally used by subscribing to them. You do this using a feed reader (aka "RSS reader" or "news reader"). Most modern web browsers have this capability in-built (such as Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari), or you can download a specialised program to do it for you (see here for a list).

The handiest thing about feeds is they are in a special machine-readable format, so your feed reader can automatically show you new items. This means you don't have to keep visiting a website to see if there's anything new.

[edit] How are feeds used in Rhub?

We use feeds in a few different ways.

[edit] Subscribing

Rhub can take existing feeds from remote sites and repurpose the contents (this is known as syndication or aggregation).

• Profile: If you set your blog address in your profile, Rhub can syndicate (re-publish) your blog entries so your friends can easily see them
• Bookmarks: You can share interesting sites with friends and if it has a feed, rhub can automatically display the contents
• Groups: If members of a group have set their blog address, rhub allows you to see all their entries together as if they were posting on one blog.

[edit] Publishing

Rhub can publish several types of things on rhub as a feed that can be subscribed to using a feed reader or other service.

• Feeds, Groups: Group messages, photos or members' blogs can be aggregated
• Feeds, Sets: The contents of sets and or comments can be published