Feeds vs. newsgroups

Feeds are new to me and I don't understand very well how to use them. I
joined a newsgroup at a website but I cannot figure out how to get it
working with news groups or even if I can do that, but I got it working with
feeds briefly but now it doesn't seem to work. Was it a mistake to delete
the feeds that I read and had no further interest in? If so, how do I get it
working again? I didn't want the huge number of feeds to take up a lot of
hard drive space. Where can I find a not-too-technical explanation of all
this technology? The Windows Live Mail help assumes more technical
understanding than I seem to have.
Merrily

"Merrily" <m_pukmel@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:5EE87FEA-F300-4BF1-B5E7-C229EA79ECD3@xxxxxx A feed, also could be called RSS Feed, or an Atom Feed. Is basically a file
on a web server which is designed to be automatically checked for new
content regularly.

For example a news website could push news stories down their RSS feed.
Windows Live Mail (or any other feed application) for example checks it
every 15 minutes (for example) and highlights it so you can see there's new
content.

Or say you've got a blog with a feed, you could subscribe to that and get
the new blog entries sent directly to Windows Live Mail.

It basically a way of saving time.

I use Internet Explorer 7 here to watch the feeds I've subscribed to, and
instead of manually checking about 50 or so websites a day, IE7 checks them
for me and shows me the ones that are updated.

Assuming you use IE7 to browse the internet you may notice that some
websites cause IE7 to make an icon along the top orange (the feed icon) you
can subscribe to feeds from here and they're automatically shared with
Windows Live Mail or other applications if you've got them installed.

For example open this up in IE7 http://www.acme.com/jef/apod/rss.xml
(probably the default browser anyway) and you'll have an option to subscribe
to that feed. Go and have a look in WLM and you'll find it listed there
too. The feed is updated every day with a new picture, so essentially
you'll get a new astronomy related picture automatically.

You probably have the 'Microsoft Feeds' automatically pre-loaded, I always
delete those.

You don't really need to worry about filling up your computer, feeds are
typically very small just a few hundred kilobytes, so you'd need to
subscribe to hundreds of thousands to start running out of space.

Phew! Hope that helps explain it. :-)

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User.
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/
http://www.windowsresource.net/

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