News aggregators

From Granular Linux Documentation

Introduction

You may often come across websites that are updated quit frequently, for example news sites, software project sites, development sites, etc. Such websites general offer what are called "news feeds" to the visitors. A news feed or simple a feed is a way of letting the regular visitors know about the recent changes made to the website, in terms of news content, development updates, new products, etc.. The feeds are distributed using RSS, XML, RDF or ATOM technologies.

Using Feeds

If you use a the Firefox browser, you must have noticed that when Firefox detects a website offering news feeds, it shows little orange icon in the address bar to indicate this.

Clicking on that orange icon in Firefox will give you options to subscribe to all types of news feeds offered by that website.

Otherwise, you can let specialized software (called News Aggregators) handle this task for you. For instance, you'll have to copy the link location to a particular news feed and add it in your favorite news aggregator.

News Aggregators

Mozilla Thunderbird is as powerful a news aggregator as it is an email client

KDE's Akregator is an excellent news aggregator with an intuitive and easy-to-use interface

Various news aggregators available to Granular users are:

• Akregator (available in the repository)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (pre-installed in Granular)
• RSSOwl (available as a GRL package)
• Liferea (available in the repository)