What is a feed?

A feed is a specially constructed web page where newspapers or blogs 'tell' what articles have been newly published.

Usually, a feed includes 20 - 50 entries, which change depending on the frequency of publication. I.e. if you open / load the feed of a large newspaper again after e.g. half an hour, you will then find e.g. 6 new entries in it, while the 6 oldest entries have been pushed out / deleted.

Each feed entry for an article usually contains an ID, the title, a short description, an author list, the URL of an image, the URL of the original article and a timestamp.

What are the types of feeds?

The most common decaying feed type is the XML format based RSS feed.

Many larger newspapers also offer a sitemap in XML format. Sitemaps include all articles currently published in a newspaper, instead of the last 20 or so.

More rarely, some blogs or newspapers also use Atom feeds (XML format) or JSON format based feeds.