FeedReader and Syndic8

Reminiscent of the heydey of UseNet and newsgroups, XML and RSS feeds have brought back the concept of content delivered to your desktop.

I might not have found out about it, but About.com recently changed our sites to be XML-based, RSS compliant and altered the main page of each site to be a blog format. There was an orange rectangle labeled XML on my page and I wanted to find out what it was there for.

It turns out that there are hundred or thousands of syndicated XML sites that you can automatically received data from.

I downloaded a free utility called FeedReader (FeedReader.com) and proceeded to populate it with XML feeds from a site called Syndic8 (Syndic8.com).

You can search for almost any topic under the sun and many metro and regional newspapers and publications. You can configure how often you want FeedReader to check for updates and have it temporarily display a pop-up window on your desktop when new information arrives.

I added a number of computer and network security sites as well as my local news and some other hobbies of interest.

thx for the fine reader tony ...will u pls list the security site to offering XL based RSS contets to populate feedreader..also ifu can some tute sites too..

Tottally agreed. List the sites! Thanx

I found all of my XML feeds through the Syndic8.com site by doing searches.

For security I did searches on computer security, network security, internet security and information security as well as hacker and hacking. Based on those searches, here are a few feed links I am using:

governmentsecurity.org
CERT/CC
SecureWorks
SecurityFocus

I also added my own About.com Internet / Network Security site just so I would know when my information was updated and posted to the XML syndicate. Here is a link:

About.com Internet / Network Security

If you do a search on "tutorial" on Syndic8.com there are 104 results with a bunch of programming ones available like:

CodingTheWeb.com: XML
CodingTheWeb.com: PHP


There are other XML feed source sites besides Syndic8 and there are other XML RSS readers besides FreeReader. But FreeReader is FREE and it works quite well for me.

To add any of the above sites to FreeReader just click on New on the toolbar and copy and paste the links from above into the New Feed Wizards box. Voila! All done.

AntiOnline also has a function much similar to this,
The AntiOnline Ticker. It displays threads found on the main page. I cannot find the original thread in which this was posted, but to use the AO ticker, right click on your task bar, click on [toolbars]>[new toolbar]. And in the address form box enter 'http://www.antionline.com/ticker.php'. Now you will have constantly updated views of threads from AO's main page.