A feed is a special method of receiving articles and other content posted to a website. If you subscribe to a site's feed, then every time that site posts a new article, it'll show up in your subscription inbox.

A feed is like email for articles. Each article is delivered to you as it's posted.

How It Works

To be more specific, a feed is just a file on a web server, the same as a webpage. But a feed is carefully formatted to contain the latest articles posted on the site, and every time a new article is posted, it's added to the feed.

On your end, to use a feed you have to use a feed aggregator, or a program that can read and display feeds. Firefox and Microsoft Outlook, for example, can subscribe to and display feeds.

Subscribing

To subscribe to a feed using Firefox, click on the feed's name, and when the feed is displayed in Firefox, click the "Subscribe Now" button displayed at the top of the page. The feed will appear in your bookmarks.

Different Feeds for Different Uses

It's important to look around on a site for the feeds made available there. The first feed you see may not be the best one for you.

Since a feed is really just a way of structuring a file, really anything can be a feed. And you can create many of them. So, for example, a cooking blog could have one feed for breakfast articles, one feed for entrees, and another feed for desserts. They could also have another feed with all the articles. Doesn't matter.