RSS feeds – EASY, FREE web info

Take the ‘drag’ aspect out of reading the world’s billions of web pages

All the latest headlines and info – including audio files, photographs and video – from favourite newsletters/websites CAN be read in one place on your computer. You DON’T have to spend time ploughing through countless emails, clicking from site to site and remembering to visit favourite sites every day.

RSS – Really Simple Syndication – will do this for you.

RSS feeds are a special kind of web page, designed to be read by computers rather than people – think of them as the free, internet version of the old-fashioned ticker-tape news wire machines.

Not all websites currently provide RSS, but it is growing rapidly in popularity and many do provide it, eg Australia’s mainstream media, the Guardian, New York Times and CNN.

What exactly IS RSS?

RSS is an internet protocol – or understanding amongst its users – that they will all use the same standard computer ‘language’ called XML, so that the communication/reading process is standardised/simplified so your computer can read quickly with an RSS ‘news reader’ (also called an ‘aggregator’). These are free, quite simple to install and therefore, for you to have access to RSS ‘feeds’/headlines.

Why use RSS?

• It is a simple way of receiving and/or distributing info on the Web – for mainstream media and ALL those organisations who put out newsletters.
• With one click on the RSS news reader icon in your title bar, you can quickly view/scan headlines, click again for an article summary, then click again for the full story.
• It saves time, does away with the massive number of email newsletters that you have to find time to read and allows you to quickly scan for items of interest.

NB Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the “recent changes” page of a blog, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS news reader can check for changes and list them for you.

How do you start using RSS feeds?

• You need a news reader – a piece of software that checks RSS feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added to them.
• Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want to receive in your news reader, by finding the orange RSS button/symbol, clicking on it and dragging it into your newsreader section.
• You’ll find an orange RSS link at the bottom of this post, but without a newsreader you will not be able to read the code.

PWF RSS2 feed