Available Feeds
There are four main feeds available on Michaelpanda.com. Perhaps a bit of overkill, but at any rate, here they are:
| Feed Name | Feed Description |
| The Pandablog | The main blog - these are the "big" articles with photos and stuff that appear about once a week. |
| Picture of the Day | Be notified when new photos are posted to the "Picture of the Day" (theoretically, daily). Picture is included in the RSS feed. |
| Tumbleblog | [To be completed soon]: The tumbleblog which is frequently updated with short snippets that don't make it into the main blog. There are no images or anything in this blog. |
| The Moblog | [To be completed soon]: Small short text updates with an accompanying picture sent directly from my phone whenever I see something that catches my eye. |
(Clicking on any of the links above will automatically open the feed in your RSS feed reader)
What is RSS?
So just what is RSS? Here's a brief explanation taken from Wikipedia.
RSS is used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. An orange rectangle with the letters XML or RSS is often used as a link to a site's RSS feed.
In 2004 and 2005, use of RSS spread to many major news organizations, including Reuters and the Associated Press, after several years of use by weblogs, technology publications and other early adopters. The first online news site to use RSS feeds was Variety.com in June of 2002. Under various usage agreements, providers allow other websites to incorporate their "syndicated" headline or headline-and-short-summary feeds.
RSS is widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries' headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files. (See podcasting, broadcatching and MP3 blogs.)
A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled webpages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. RSS saves users from having to repeatedly visit favorite websites to check for new content or be notified of updates via email. It is now very common to find RSS feeds on most major web sites, as well as many smaller ones.
Feed Readers or news aggregators are typically constructed as extensions to a web browser, as extensions to an email program, or as standalone programs. Some programs now also have native support of RSS and/or Atom.
Web-based feed readers and news aggregators require no software installation and make the user's "feeds" available on any computer with Web access.
Some aggregators syndicate (combine) RSS feeds into new feeds, e.g. take all football related items from several sports feeds and provide a new football feed.
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Feed Readers
You'll need a feed reader (sometimes called a "feed aggregator") to access the Michaelpanda.com RSS feeds. There are literally dozens up dozens of freely downloadable feed readers out there - all you need to do is run a quick google search and take your pick! Also, be aware that most modern browsers (which means not Internet Explorer) come with feed readers built in (Firefox and Safari, for example. IE users can add RSS functionality to their browsers via the freeware Pluck plug-in).
While there are too many feed readers out there to recommend one or two as "the best", the following are some of the more popular:
Windows: Feed Reader (simple but efficient), Sharpreader (another simple but efficient reader), Wizz RSS (enhances Firefox), Desktop Sidebar (wonderful tool that has sophisticated RSS feed reader built in)
Mac OS X: Netnews Wire Lite (freeware version available)
Linux: Straw (popular open source feedreader for linux users)
Other: RSSgenr8 (html scraper that will let you create RSS feeds for sites without them. Geeky stuff)
If you would like a list of other feed readers, you can try blogspace.com's recommended list or Wikipedia's (rather exhaustive) list.