News Feeds

News Feeds are a way of automatically alerting you to changes on a web site, like new news stories on the front page. All you have to do is wait for the alert to be sent to you.

It's usually based on RSS (or Atom, but don't worry about the technology because it's been made easy for you). Microsoft, among others, have re-christened it 'web feeds' or 'news feeds', because that's what they actually are.

If you 'subscribe' to a 'feed', new stuff on a web site is fed out to you as a headline. You then read the story ... or not ... as you want.

This saves you lots of time because you don't have to continuously visit your favorite sites to find out what's going on, and you get to choose whether to follow up a headline in your own time.

Google the term 'newsreaders' if you're interested to find out more, or visit Wikipedia, among others.

How you read the 'news' - Internet Explorer 7

In the early days, you used news gatherers (or aggregators) designed to display the feed. Next, browsers like Firefox allowed you to use the browser itself. Finally, Microsoft got involved!

Microsoft realized that RSS had to be taken seriously and, as often happens, began developing its own ideas. Microsoft concluded that RSS basically dealt with 'lists' and that lists could actually cover a lot of other items besides news. So, they proposed a few extensions to RSS. These, understandably, caused some consternation at first but agreement was reached, particularly about the 'broadcast' symbol to be used ... which is shown above left.

You will see this little 'broadcast' logo on many web sites now. The latest IE7, and other browsers, have a special button marked with this logo. Click on that, and the available feeds on that page will be shown to you. Then all you have to do is subscribe to the feed.

Internet Explorer 7 can include as many news feeds as you want. If you're not using IE7 yet our advice is 'get it'. It's free. It's got 'tabbed browsing' (great for opening many sites at once), improved security, and a host of other benefits.

Blogs

Blogs - short for weblogs - started out as a kind of personal publishing thing - you could sit in your bedroom and publish your wildest thoughts to anyone who cared to read them. They got a bad reputation, but things have moved on and now there are millions of highly professional blogs out there, especially in business. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have official blogs where you can listen in to what is going on and even respond if you wish. These companies, and many, many others, have realized that setting up good communications with their customers pays real dividends.

Blogs work beautifully in conjunction with RSS. You sit at your PC and simply wait for the web feed to deliver the latest headlines. We
believe that blogs + RSS are a great way for you to keep up with news about industrial automation.

The PTO offers PROFIblog, the world's first blog focused on PROFIBUS and PROFINET. It's run by PTO Deputy Director Carl Henning, who blogs about a wide variety of topics all somehow related to automation. His blog interacts with other automation blogs too, so there's usually a matrix of automation ideas floating about to learn from ... or even contribute to. Read PROFIblog here.

Blog list

To help get you started, Carl Henning has provided this file of his favorite industrial blogs. Unzip it, and then import it into your news reader or browser to see the kinds of news resources you could be receiving free of charge. And with no effort!