What is a news feed (RSS)?

According to the wikipedia a news feed consists of:

"a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship."

The operative keywords here are standardized format.

What are the benefits?

The standardized format allows for data to be published only once but being readable by multiple applications. This means, we can and do send the headlines of the infohub to your email client, your RSS-Reader (like Google Reader), export them to your websites or your smartphones, tablets, widgets for your desktop etc.

The major benefit is that we actively push the information out and update content whenever we publish new articles. You don't have to wait until we send out a mailing announcing new content (we will still do that though). If you subscribe to our feed, you will find new information in your inbox the very moment we publish it. 

Any disadvantages?

Only minor. News feeds lost some steam during the last couple of years due to the rise of facebook and twitter. But the underlying format (xml) is solid and some flavors of it like RDF may come back in the semantic web.

How to add the infohub feed to Thunderbird (9.x.x) on Windows

First, you need to create an RSS account in Thunderbird (the following is from Mozilla):

To do so:

• Go to the "File" menu and select "New -> Account". Alternatively, you can go to the "Tools" menu and select "Account Settings", and click on the "Add Account" button.
• In the dialog box that pops up, select "RSS News & Blogs" and press the "Next" button.
• Enter an account name, press the "Next" button, and finally press the "Finish" button. This new account will now appear in the folders pane in the main Thunderbird window.

Note: if the option to create an RSS account does not even appear, it is probably because you chose a "Custom" (rather than "Standard") install of Thunderbird, and you did not select to include RSS Support in your installation. In that case, you should uninstall Thunderbird and reinstall it, making sure to include the RSS option this time.

Subscribe to a feed

You subscribe to a feed through the "RSS Subscriptions" dialog, which can be accessed in any of these ways:

• Right-click on the account name in the folders pane and select "Manage Subscriptions".
• Click on the account name in the folders pane, and then click on the "Manage Subscriptions" link in the main Thunderbird window.
• Go to "Tools -> Account Settings", click on the account name in the left-hand pane, and then click the "Manage Subscriptions" button.

Once you've brought up the "RSS Subscriptions" dialog, all you need to do to subscribe to an RSS feed is click the "Add" button, enter the URL for the feed into the box, and click "OK". After the feed is verified, it will then appear in the "RSS Subscriptions" dialog and in the folders pane under the account.

In the same way, you can add more feeds under a single RSS account. If you subscribe to numerous feeds, you may wish to create more than one RSS News & Blogs account, each with multiple subscribed feeds.

This is what you get (click to enlarge):

Output may differ in the future as we add images to the feed and more text.

URLs to subscribe to the infohub feeds

We actually offer different flavors of feeds. They are accessible through different URLs:

1. RSS2 (this is our main feed): http://infohub.dots-software.com/infohub/?&type=100
2. RSS091:  http://infohub.dots-software.com/infohub/?&type=101
3. RDF:  http://infohub.dots-software.com/infohub/?&type=102
4. ATOM:  http://infohub.dots-software.com/infohub/?&type=103

Hints: 

Web browsers:

If you use Firefox click on the menu item RSS Feed in the page footer after you logged into the infohub. This will open a new window offering different possibilities to display the feed's content. We like the option live bookmarks. This displays the headlines of our feed in your bookmarks. Benefit: You stay in touch with the infohub news all the time without loging in.

Safari will display all feeds nicely, just paste the urls above into the adressbar.

There is no native  supports for feeds in Chrome, you will need an extension.

Internet Explorer supports feeds since version 7.

Smartphones:

RSS clients are available for Smartphones and tablets. Use them to be up-to-date while on the road.