What is RSS?

RSS is an easy way of receiving new content from websites without having to constantly revisit the site to check for updates, otherwise known as 'News feeds'.

Choose a flavour

Just as ice-cream comes in many flavours, so do News feeds. This site supports the 2 main flavours, Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0. We think Atom is the best, but please feel free to use the RSS feed if you prefer.

An example of there use...

A good example of how RSS feeds are useful is the way the BBC uses them. It's News team provide RSS feeds which you can subscribe to, keeping you up to date with the very latest news as it happens

How do I read these feeds?

All you need an RSS reader (also called an ‘aggregator’ a feed reader), which will check for and inform you of new content in the RSS feed. For Windows users, there are applications such as FeedDemon, and for Mac OS X, I personally use RSS Menu. However Safari RSS and Firefox are excellent free options.

Firefox users can also download extensions such as Sage and rssPlayPen to allow them to read RSS feeds in the browser.

Bloglines is an excellent online service that works in most browsers which eliminates the need for downloading an application.