Earlier this week I was helping a client out with some blog-related questions, and the topic of feeds came up.

“I hear it all the time, but I must admit, I don’t really know what a feed is,” she told me.

Mobile RSS is available for iPad and iPhone, with both free (with ads) and paid versions.

I started to explain, and suggested she read a post about feeds I had written a few years ago. But I found myself elaborating on the simple feed explanation given in that post, as using feeds in a website can be pretty powerful stuff.

I waste spend a lot of time reading numerous feeds — some for fun, many for work. My favorite method of feed reading is with a great iPad app called MobileRSS. It allows me to combine my personal Google Reader account with my work one, so that all my feeds are accessible in one place — VERY convenient! If you have a smartphone or other mobile device (like an iPad), I recommend installing a feed reader app. You’ll find yourself much more able to keep up with your favorite blogs.

But while feeds are geared toward the reader, they aren’t ONLY for the reader — they can be tools for a website owner to pull in content from around the web. Look to the right in our own blog’s sidebar to see an example. We have a lot of clients who blog, and with the use of an aggregate feed (see my previously mentioned post on feeds for more detail), you can see the titles and authors of the most recent ten blog posts from our clients. How handy!

An excerpt of Diane's most recent off-site blog post is displayed (using a customized feed) between her own blog's recent posts and comments.

If you blog in many places, and you want a central location to showcase your posts, you can customize feeds to display according to your needs. Diane Gaston, for example, has a blog on her own website, but she also is a regular contributor elsewhere. In her blog’s sidebar you will always find a little excerpt of her latest off-site post, to which you can directly link. Grace Burrowes, whose site we’ve just recently launched, is a regular contributor at two blogs, in addition to having a blog of her own. Because of customized feeds, she now has excerpts from her latest off-site posts in the sidebar of her own blog.

An integrated feed on your website can be powerful tool. You keep your site current; you keep your visitors well-informed. But be warned! If you are pulling your feed from a blog with a corrupt feed, or trying to pull only certain types of posts from a blog with inconsistent categories or tags, you might have to get a little creative. This is why, for a website developer, knowledge of more than just the basics of how feeds work is a must.