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| What is RSS?

Home > News > What is RSS

What is RSS

Imagine an Internet that delivers news, features and media to you, rather then repeatedly going back to your favourite websites for updates.

RSS allows you to see when websites have been updated with new content, ranging from simple text news stories to pictures, audio or video. You simply subscribe to a website RSS feed and sit back and let the web do the hard work for you.

How does it work?

You will need something called a news reader to display your chosen RSS feeds, you can find a whole listing of these on Google, or you can use some of the WPSA recommended ones below.

My Yahoo - http://my.yahoo.com
A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.

Bloglines - http://www.bloglines.com/
A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.

Google Reader - http://www.google.com/reader/
Free feed reader stores manual or imported reading lists.

A news reader is the point at which all your RSS subscriptions come together in one easily accessible place. This can be a web-page or a piece of software that you download.

How do I know if a website has an RSS feed?

Many more websites every day are publishing RSS feeds, the sites normally have a button that you click on like the ones below.

 

Quick guide to subscribing

  • Click on the orange RSS feed button in the bar on the right to copy the RSS URL to your clipboard
  • You then paste the address into your chosen news reader to begin your subscription

The BBC guide to RSS is excellent >>