In the past few days three people have asked me what I'm on about when I talk about RSS Feeds. Wikipedia has a whole load on it, but frankly I couldn't be bothered to read it, it was very long and detailed. So I will do my best to explain it in reference to Livejournal in particular.

A lot of websites have RSS Feeds these days. Particularly news sites and blogs - sites to which there is new content added every day (ish) and the feeds make it easier to discover if there is new content rather than going to the site regularly to check. Livejournal has these feeds - there's one for every user and community.

There are three different types of feed: full, partial and titles only. Full gives the subject and full text of your posts. Partial gives the subject and a certain number of characters of your post. Titles only just gives the subject. Most feeds you see on the internet are full because they are the most useful. Some sites use partial as an attempt to get people to read the content on their site and therefore see their adverts and click on them. Partial feeds are generally not terribly well liked because it involves extra effort to read them, and because people dislike being manipulated in that way.

You can see your feed by going to http://yourusername.livejournal.com/data/rss Just stick that in your browser's address bar and it will display your RSS feed for you. If you change rss to atom that gives you your atom feed. There are differences between them, but for all intents and purposes they're the same thing.

Depending on what browser you have depends on exactly how your feed is displayed. At the very least it'll show you your last 25 entries, most recent at the top, with the subject, text of the post and link back to it. If you're using an older browser (IE6 for instance) you'll see lots of HTML tags too.

It might well only display your public entries - if it hasn't been clever enough to work out who you are (possibly using your login or cookies) you're not eligible to read friends locked or private posts. You will definitely notice that lj-cuts don't exist here. What you see in the feed is the same thing you see if you go to the comments page of any of your posts.

Livejournal does have a way of seeing your non-public posts too (and I wish Flickr had this). Add ?auth=digest to the address and a box will pop up asking you for your username and password. Once you've told it that it knows who you are and will show you all posts you have access to.

However, if you have your LJ set to adult concepts, this is messed up a bit because first the browser needs to know how old you are. If you're logged into LJ then you'll see your feed fine. If you log out, then you'll see a page asking you to confirm you're over 14. Once you do, then it'll show you your feed. At least, I think it's the logging in and out that makes the difference, experimentation has not given me any conclusive results so far.

As you can see, from the lack of lj-cuts in feeds, it's a good idea to tell people what's beneath your cut somewhere other than in the text of your LJ cut. So, for example, if your lj-cut went like this:
<lj-cut text="spoilers for episode 2">
and you never mention anywhere else in the post or subject that you have spoilers for episode 2 in your post, no one reading by RSS Feed will ever know. It's a good idea generally to do this, because if someone was to point someone else to your post using the comment link, they'll also have no way of knowing there are spoilers for episode 2 because that bit above between the "" disappears.

For the few people reading this that have your feed set to titles only, you won't see any text of your posts. As you can see from this, it is important to give all your posts a meaningful subject to give people reading by RSS Feed a chance to decide if it's something they'd be interested in reading.

Now I've written all this explaining what a feed is, you'll be asking yourself what the point is, for livejournal at least. You'd be right in thinking it's just another way of reading your friends list. What you could also use it for, for example, is monitoring someone else's livejournal without having to friend them and without having to check their journal specifically. So you could do that for your Yuletide recipient for instance.

For me, I use it because I find it easier than reading web pages backward and trying to remember what I read last. And also because I read non-LJ blogs as well, the livejournal feed for them seems to be several hours behind. I use an offline reader, and for me RSS feeds look a bit like email: unread ones (because they're new or because I've marked them as unread) appear in bold. Here's a screencap to illustrate: (click for a bigger picture)

This way, I never miss any posts (although I might well mark some as read without reading them) and I keep some marked as unread so I remember I want to go back to them. When I used to read using my friends list I never used to remember. Although now I have tabbed browsing it's not quite so bad. And since there are no lj-cuts it means I can read every post with one click, I never have to click again to read what's under the cut. If it's something that doesn't interest me, then I just don't read it - it's rare that I have to scroll down on any entry.

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