Feeds, stats, readers and more.

1. What is a feed?
A feed is constantly updated information of what has been posted or commented on your blog. It’s what you write but without the design. Read this definition of feeds from the BBC.

Check Show#1 - RSS in Plain English

2. Where is my feed?
Just add /feed/ to your blog address. So for this blog the feed is at http://faq.wordpress.com/feed/

3. How do I make my feeds?
You don’t. It is created automatically when either the posts change or the comments change.

4. Are there different sorts of feeds?
Yes - there is Rss .92, Rss 2.0, Atom .3, Atom 1 (and probably some more). Does it matter? To us - not a lot. (Someone who has a technical interest in feeds will say that is wrong but really, for most of us it doesn’t matter)

5. How do I read a feed?
You need a feedreader, also called an aggregator. More details below.

6. Why are feeds good?
There are a number of reasons. Here are a few:

• If you have 10 friends who have blogs, then to see if they have blogged anything you need to visit their sites to see that. 10 visits you will need to make and that’s 10 page loads. If you had a feedreader, it can check those 10 blogs every hour and let you know when one had been updated. That saves you time.
• If you are on dial-up, you don’t have to visit 10 blogs and load all that information. Your reader will get just the latest posts. That saves you time.
• If you have a lot of readers, each page hit costs you bandwidth as visitors need to download the whole page to read what you have written. Giving a feed means people will use that and you save bandwidth. (Not applicable to wordpress.com but it’s still a reason)
• You can have constant searches. If you go to the web-based blog aggregators you can search inside their feeds. Let’s say you have an interest in ‘Dr Pepper’. 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’ at that site. Additionally you can usually set up a reader to watch for words in all the feeds it gets too.
• If your feedreader archives, then you can keep lots of information in that as a reference. For example, if you read something in a feed and then a few days later you need that article again, your feedreader should be able to search and find what you need.

7. Where can I find a feedreader?
There are many programs. They fall into two categories: Web-based, Desktop-based.

• Web-based - Bloglines is one example. They are services you subscribe to. They offer hundreds of feeds, you can see what other people are reading, see the popular feeds and they take care of the grabbing of the feeds.
• Desktop programs run on your machine and you can still browse other feed sites.

Try both - unless you use more than one computer or you are going away and want to keep up to date. In those cases a web-based service could be better. Whatever you choose though, do look for the free stuff - there are some really good free readers out there.

You can find lists here:
http://www.literature.at/elib/www/wiki/index.php
http://www.newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators
Nearly all of them will come pre-loaded with some feeds.
Adding your feeds will be as easy as either adding a URL or dragging an icon.

8. What’s a partial feed and a full feed?
If you are reading this in a reader, you will see all of the post as this is a full feed. It means you do not have to come to this blog to read any more of it.

If you offer a partial feed, then in all the aggregators and readers it will have ‘more……’ after the first paragraph or so. The reader must click to go to your site to read the rest.

You can decide which you want to use - it’s a matter of some debate as to which is best. Take a look at Problogger’s view and that of Feedster. Both have lots of links which are interesting to follow.

9. Can the feed be stopped?
Only if your blog is made fully private by you.
10. If I have a password-protected post will my post be shown in it?
The content of the post will not be shown.