What is RSS?

In a world of billions of web pages, keeping up to date with the information you want can be a drag.

Have the latest news and features delivered directly to you, rather than click from site to site?

RSS allows you to see when sites from all over the internet have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and articles (or even audio files, photographs or video) in one place, as soon as they are published, without having to remember to visit each site every day.

In general, the first thing you need is something called a news reader. This is a piece of software that checks RSS feeds and lets you read any news that have been added to them. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you either download your e-mail using Thunderbird, or keep it on a web-based service like !Yahoo.

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 and subscribing to the relevant RSS feeds. If you would like our latest news, simply visit the site and you will notice an orange RSS button on the bottom right hand side.

We have RSS feeds for our ring of sites.

How to subscribe to the feed?

On the web, these buttons can be something like , etc. or a normal text link.

Just drag the button or 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, automatically check for RSS feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This can make subscribing to RSS feeds much easier. For more details on these, please check their websites.

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 choose one that will work with your computer. Here’s a list of aggregators: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/directory/5/aggregators

We think those listed below are good:

• Thunderbird - http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird - Mozilla’s email client can read RSS Feeds
• Sage - http://sage.mozdev.org - is an excellent SideBar for Firefox.
• Wizz Computers http://www.wizzcomputers.com/Welcome.php - offers a SideBar and
• JWizz RSS News Reader http://www.wizzcomputers.com - a stand-alone Java based version of Wizz RSS News Reader. (embedding either Internet Explorer or Mozilla into the application, for the rendering of HTML)

That's the basics. Subscribe to our RSS Feeds to know instantly whenever there are new uploads!