What is RSS?

With billions of web pages available today, keeping up to date with the information you want can be a drag. RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like web pages, including major news sites like CNN.com, notification-oriented community sites like The Westford Web, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way. On The Westford Web, we are enabling RSS feeds for pages that contain notices and announcements. These RSS feeds can be syndicated right to your PC desktop, and you will be able to read our posts without having to visit the web page. There are several definitions for the acronym RSS, but the most widely accepted term is Real Simple Syndication.

PC desktop RSS-aware programs called news readers are becoming very popular. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite web sites by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them. Many web browsers, such as Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari, also support RSS feeds. This feature will allow the headlines to be displayed as a live bookmark in your browser. As the headlines are updated, the bookmark title will automatically update, and the link will take you to the new page.

How do I start using RSS feeds?

In general, the first thing you need is a news reader. Google maintains a good list of RSS news reader software for Windows and other operating systems. You can also use the Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer 7 web browsers to set live bookmarks for news feeds. Visit the Firefox web site for more information on live bookmarks.

If you are using the Firefox web browser, simply visit the Community Notebook or Westford Calendar page and you will notice the RSS live bookmark alert or XML icon will turn on. Click the RSS/XML live bookmark icon to add the news feed to your browser. From then on you would only need to look at your bookmarks to see if the bookmark title has updated. If the bookmark title updates, then there is a new web page available. You can then click the bookmark link to visit the updated web page.

If you use a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want. Then you would only need to add the web address of the RSS enabled web page. For example, if you would like the latest Westford Community Notebook items, enter http://www.westford.com/notebook/ into the news reader address line. The Westford Notebook information should now show up as an additional item in your list of new feeds. From that point on, all you will need to do is check your news reader or web browser book mark and you will see the latest announcement headlines that are displayed on the Westford Community Notebook. If you want to view the details of an item, simply click the link to bring up the full news item.

If you are a web page developer, you can also add RSS feeds to your web pages.Your web page will automatically update whenever the RSS feed is updated.