RSS Feed Reader
RSS feeds are a spam-free, quick and efficient way to read news and weblogs. To get the most out of newsfeeds, you need a powerful aggregator. Aggregator refers to a web site or computer software that aggregates a specific type of information from multiple online sources. In computing, a feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader, rss reader or simply aggregator, is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader".
Web-based Reader
The most commonly known web-based aggregators are reader applications on the web. These are meant for personal use and are hosted on remote servers. Because the application is available via the Web, it can be accessed anywhere by a user with an Internet connection.
Client software
Client software aggregators are installed applications designed to collect Web feed subscriptions and group them together using a user-friendly interface. The graphical user interface of such applications often closely resembles that of popular e-mail clients, using a three-panel composition in which subscriptions are grouped in a frame on the left, and individual entries are browsed, selected, and read in frames on the right.Software aggregators can also take the form of news tickers which scroll feeds like ticker tape, alerters that display updates in windows as they are refreshed.
Media aggregators
Media aggregators are sometimes referred to as "Podcatchers" due to the popularity of the term "podcast" used to refer to a web feed containing audio or video. Media aggregators refer to applications, client software or Web based, which maintain subscriptions to feeds that contain audio or video media enclosures. They can be used to automatically download media, playback the media within the application interface, or synchronize media content with a portable media player.
Broadcatching
Several BitTorrent client software applications have added the ability to "broadcatch" torrents of distributed multimedia through the aggregation of web feeds.
Feed filtering
One of the problems with news aggregators is that the volume of articles can sometimes be overwhelming, especially when the user has many Web feed subscriptions. As a solution, many feed readers allow users to tag each feed with one or more keywords which can be used to sort and filter the available articles into easily navigable categories. Another option is to import the user's Attention Profile to filter items based on their relevance to the user's interests.
[Source:wiki]
Integrating a rss reader to your website
I am writing in terms of php programming. In php there are lot of rss reader classes which can be downloaded and easily integrated to your website.
One of them is the Magpie RSS reader
A XML-based RSS parser in PHP. Supports most RSS versions including Userland RSS and RSS 1.0. Supports modules, and namespaces.
Read more from: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
magpie class reads the rss feed, then parse it and display it on your browser.
This class can generate HTML pages from content retrieved from an RSS feed. The HTML is generated using template files that define how each RSS feed entry is displayed. The class uses the Magpie library to fetch and parse the RSS feed data.
I had found an extended class of magpie from phpclasses.org which uses Magpie.
Check this : http://www.phpclasses.org/package/2079-PHP-Generate-HTML-pages-from-RSS-feeds-using-templates.html
There are also javascript based RSS Reader. Check the below given links:
- Javascript based RSS Feed reader - Copy and Paste JavaScript in your page
- How to read RSS feed using Javascript and Diplay it on Web page?
Enjoy the RSS Feed Benefits...HAPPY PROGRAMMING!