What is RSS?

You may have noitced that we have an RSS logo on our web site, but you may be wondering what RSS is.

With billions of web pages on the internet, keeping up to date with the information you want can be a time consuming job.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a service set up to have the latest news and features of your favourite web sites delivered directly to you, removing the need for you to have to clicking from site to site checking content

RSS takes the hassle out of staying up-to-date, by showing you the very latest information that you are interested in all together, in one place.

Not all websites currently provide RSS, but the number of web sites that supply RSS feeds is growing rapidly and many large web sites, such as The Guardian, BBC, New York Times and CNN now provide RSS data.

How do I start using RSS feeds?

The first thing you need is something called a news reader or RSS aggregator. There are many different versions. Some are downloadable applications, but some are accessed using a browser but they all have one thing in common. They allow you to subscribe to the RSS feeds you are interested in.

Once you have chosen a news reader, and installed the necessary application, all you have to do is to decide which RSS feeds you want to monitor. Web sites that have an RSS feed can be identified by the orange RSS button -

To subscribe to the RSS feed, simply drag the button, or the URL of the RSS feed into your news reader. Alternatively you can cut and past the same URL into a new feed in your news reader.

Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, make life even easier by including functionality which automatically picks up the RSS feeds for you. For more details on these, please check their indicidual websites.

Some popular news readers include Newz Crawler, FeedDemon and RSS Bandit for Windows and Newsfire and NetNewsWire for Mac OS X
You can even monitor RSS feeds using one of the web based services such as Bloglines, My Yahoo! and NewsGator