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In this tutorial I will cover a few topics:

• What is a "News Feed?"
• What is RSS?
• What is Atom?
• What is a "News Aggregator," a "News Reader?"
• Downloading and installing the Vienna news reader.
• Introduction to the Vienna interface.
• The Vienna preferences window.
• Customizing the look of Vienna.
• Grouping news feeds.
• Subscribing to a feed from a web site.

What is a "News Feed?"

A news feed is, typically, a small text file that contains headlines, and short summaries that accompany them.

The text file can also include links to graphics as well as media files like mp3, mp4, and videos. When the news feed includes media files, it can also be called a "podcast."

What is RSS? What is Atom?

RSS and Atom are two file formats for news feeds. For the most part, little ol' end users don't really need to worry too much about it. RSS was the first widely adopted version, then Atom was developed to be a more mature implementation. (RSS is an acronym which has at least two accepted meanings: Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary. Wikipedia has more information about both RSS, and Atom.)

I say that end users don't need to worry, mainly because good software can deal with both, and not throw a ton of errors at you. If you find your software is choking or full of bugs, or otherwise doesn't seem to work properly, you may end up having to figure out what kind of feed your software requires and how to obtain it from the site you are interested in following. But if you're doing that much work, I'd say it's time to get a new piece of software to fetch the feeds.

What kind of software? ...

What is a "News Aggregator," a "News Reader?"

For most intents and purposes "news aggregator" and "news reader" are the synonymous. However, the former could imply a service you find on the Internet, while the latter tends to imply a desktop application.

This article is going to focus on one such news reader, which could also be a called a news aggregator. Vienna is an open-source MacOS X application that comes with some built-in feeds to get you started, but allows for lots of customization with regard to adding your own feeds, how often Vienna asks those sources for updated headlines, and much much more!

Let's get started!