So, what are these new fangled things I'm hearing about called “feeds”? Well, they are a way of receiving updates about almost anything! Feeds are used for news items, blog posts, site updates and a whole lot more. There are two main types, RSS and Atom. They both do basically the same thing, but just have different coding.

Imagine that each day you walk down to your local shop to buy your daily paper. This is a lot of bother and wastes time each day, that you could be using to drink your coffee. Eventually, you think, “Enough is enough!”, so you ring up your newspaper company. They offer to deliver the paper to your house every morning! Now you have more time to do the crossword puzzles and drink your coffee.

Feeds are like this. Instead of having to visit each and every site you want to check for new news, you simply “subscribe” to their feeds and have an “aggregator”, or feed reader, put all the new news together.

Lilina is installed on a web server, so you can share the latest news with everyone. An example of how you might use it would be if you want to show all the news from your projects on one page. Or maybe, you want to have news about one topic from several sites. This is easy with Lilina.

We're currently working on a version of Lilina which will be hosted on our server. We're also working on a version of Lilina which will set up a server on your computer. Stay tuned for both of these projects.

If you just want to read feeds on your desktop, we recommend the excellent RSSOwl, which is completely open source and written in Java.

To start using RSS and Atom feeds, install Lilina on your server and start subscribing to feeds! It's really that simple.