What are RSS news feeds?

RSS Icon

News feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.

Feeds are also known as RSS. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people plump for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. In essence, the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people.

God bless the BBC, please follow this link to find out more about RSS feeds and how to use them, if you have trouble let me know and I will talk you through how you can set them up

News Feeds from the BBC

The only thing I would add to this is if you are using the latest version of Microsoft Outlook 2007 or Windows Live Mail they have a RSS news reader built into them which is really useful. You will find the news reader in your inbox. This is great, you get your news with your mail all in one place, presumably while you are eating your eggs and bacon and ignoring the children over breakfast

Why is RSS useful in this site?

In our site RSS should be useful in 2 ways.

• Down the right hand side these are the RSS feeds of 5 sites I get news from on a regular basis, if you click on any of the items (say from Guardian Unlimited) it should take you to this article on the Guardian site. Our site is set up to list 4 most recent articles published by any of the sites. For the Guardian these change on an hour by hour basis, for Sandbag they publish an article every few days. I am hoping people will recommend their favourite sites and we can feature them. If you click on the title (ie Guardian Unlimited) it will take you to the site itself, you can subscribe to the RSS feed yourself there by clicking on the RSS symbol which is a little orange square will some white radiating lines in it (above).

• The other way RSS will be useful will be to update you when new information appears on our site. If you are on the home page of our website, if you see the RSS symbol on the menu at the top of the browser, click on it and it will take you to a page which will ask you whether you want to subscribe to this Feed. If you subscribe to the feed if will update your ‘bookmarks’ (in Firefox) or ‘Favourites’ (in Internet Explorer) every time new content is posted.