What is RSS?
In a world heaving under the weight of billions of web pages, keeping up to date with the information you want can be a drag. Wouldn’t it be better to have the latest news and features delivered directly to you, rather than clicking from site to site? Well now you can, thanks to a very clever service, RSS.
There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but the majority plump for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Put plainly, it allows you to identify the content you like and have it delivered directly to you. It takes the hassle out of staying up-to-date, by showing you the very latest information that you are interested in.
Many websites currently provide RSS, and it is growing rapidly in popularity. For example, The Guardian, New York Times, the BBC and CNN provide it.
The VMI70 Web Site has RSS feeds for you to use. You can link to the home page or any of the other pages (News, Announcements) to allow you to review the ‘headlines’ before going to the article. Any new article will show its subject and you may use that as a link to go to the article itself. Some RSS readers will display all the current articles in their entirety.
How do I start using RSS feeds?
In general, the first thing you need is something called a news reader. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. All allow you to display and subscribe to the RSS feeds you want.
Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to add our web site to your reader. To do this, click on the word “RSS” under the “Meta” section in the sidebar and you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the RSS feed into your news reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader.
Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, have functionality which automatically picks up RSS feeds for you. For more details on these, please check their websites.
| Windows Newz Crawler; FeedDemon; Awasu Mac OS X Newsfire; NetNewsWire Web Bloglines; My Yahoo!; NewsGator Other News Readers (Google) |
How do I get a News Reader?
There is a range of different news readers available and new versions are appearing all the time.
Different news readers work on different operating systems, so you will need to take this into account when you make your choice.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to the BBC News site for the basic article on RSS that I have blatantly plagarized.
