Introduction to RSS Feeds

NOTE: The Pink Mayhem guides are intended to be introductory rather than exhaustive - please contact us if you wish to know more.

Introduction

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or News feeds allow you to view, display or distribute content that you would like others to see. Users can see new information as soon as its published, without having to visit the source website and they can aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

Reading News Feeds

In general, the first thing you need is something called a news reader - this checks the feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added. There are many options - either browser based or downloadable applications.

Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, some examples are; Bloglines, Google Reader, FeedZilla, NewsGator, Microsoft Live, My Yahoo!

Downloadable applications let you store them on your computer, rather like Outlook, here are but a few:
Windows; Newz Crawler, FeedDemon, Awasu
Mac OS X; Newsfire, NetNewsWire

You need to decide what content you want it to receive, when you visit a page with News Feeds you will see a graphic icon, click on that and follow the instructions.

Displaying News Feeds

It is quite straightforward to to display news feeds from other websites on your own website - for example relevant specialist news from the BBC. Where sites permit this (the BCC do), they provide instructions and often specify that they should be credited as a source.

Creating News Feeds

There are many ways to acheive this; speak with your web company for the most suitable solution for your site, one option is to generate RSS Feeds through Google Reader - instructions are given on their site.

Other Options

Blogging and Twitter are alternative ways to push your information to your readers.