A Web Feed For My Paintings & Newsletters
I've added a web feed to my website to list new paintings and my occasional newsletters. If you're already subscribed to my newsletter via the email signup, you might want to switch to the web feed instead - then you'll also know when I add new paintings to my website. I'm keeping the newsletter email signup, so stick with that if you prefer. If you know all about web feeds, then that's all I need to tell you - you can stop reading and go subscribe if you wish to. The feed is available in RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 formats.
Also note that my blog has always had a feed (most blogs do) and you can subscribe to my blog feed as well. There will be some overlap with what I put on my blog and on my main website, but not much.
What is a Web Feed?
Here's where I'll probably loose some people, so let me say up front that you don't really need to know any of this. And if you're not too comfortable with the techie side of computers, you better stop reading now.
If you don't know what a web feed is, it's a pretty simple concept but rather hard to explain. First, you'll often see the terms RSS, ATOM, news feed, web feed, or syndication used interchangeably (which is not entirely correct, but close enough for this purpose). Feeds are used by some websites as a means of publishing their latest content. Blogs use feeds to publish their latest posts, most news sites use it to publish the latest news stories. My feed will publish my latest paintings and newsletters. 'Publish' means that the website provides a list of its newest content to any software that wants to use it. These feeds are intended to be read by software, not read directly by people. That's the boring part...
The interesting part is in the software that can make use of these feeds. The generic term is a 'feed reader' - they give you a single consolidated view of the latest items from your favorite websites. You'll have one page where you can see what's new, so you don't waste time checking individual sites and trying to figure out what's new - the software figures that out for you. Say you like to watch the CNN and BBC websites for current news, you watch my blog and website because you're my best friend, and you watch a few other blogs too because they're interesting. Add all of these individual feeds to your feed reader and you'll save yourself a lot of time because you'll see at a glance which sites have something new since you last checked. Exactly how you subscribe to a feed depends on what feed reader you're using, but often it's just a matter of clicking on the 
icon when you see it on the website you want to subscribe to. (Sometimes the icon will say RSS, ATOM or XML.)
There are a lot of different feed readers you can get for free, but here's what I like to use:
- Thunderbird: if you use thunderbird for your email, you can use it for feeds too. Feeds will appear just like another email inbox where you can read items, delete them, keep them for reference, etc. When a website feed has something new, it simply appears in your inbox. (I think Outlook can do this too).
- Google Reader: if you use any of Google's other free services, you should check this one out - it's currently my favorite way of keeping up with things. Because this reader is web based, it's available from anywhere that you access the internet from.
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- If you use Firefox for your browser, the Google Reader Notifier add-on will put a small notifier in your status bar, showing you the count of unread items in your Google Reader. So you very quickly see when there's a new item on any of your favorite sites.
- Newer web browsers like Firefox, IE7 and Opera have built-in support too, and they'll usually show you the icon in the address bar.
Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter,
Joe Kazimierczyk
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