Rss Feeds

[susanwells]

Can someone help ? I want to add some sites and especially blogs so that they come to me automatically when they are updated but I cxan`t find out how to do it. I have searched sites for some button or something but no joy... I get news etc RSS fine on my Yahoo.:hearty

[TheOldhamWhisper]

http://www.feedster.com/

might help

[vegyjones]

Hire a servant to check your blogs for updates and e-mail them to you :D

[TheOldhamWhisper]

http://www.blog-search.com/rss-feed.html

is another that might help (unlike Vegy!)

[vegyjones]

Scolded. Ooherr! :(

[susanwells]

Well thank you Oldham.. at least SOME people are genuinely helpful around here :hearty

[GlosRFC]

Hi Susan,

There are two aspects to RSS - do you want to receive feeds or do you want to set up your own feed from your website/blog? For now, I guess you're talking about being able to receive them.

There are two things you need:
1) a source of news feeds.
2) a newsreader.

TOW has provided links to a couple news feed sources. You can also try the usual news providers too, for example the BBC has a list of RSS feeds (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm) that you can subscribe to. Most of the newspapers have the same thing. The Times RSS feeds can be found here (http://www.business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/audio_video/rss/) along with a description of news feeds in general. Search engines also provide news feeds, such as the one for Google (http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html).

For blogs it's a bit different as it's down to the individual whether they want to provide an RSS feed or not. They're not particularly difficult to do but it's just another task that the site owner has to manage. Some blog sites will provide the tools to do this automatically. Fortunately it's quite easy to spot if there is a news feed available from a site and that's the use of the orange RSS logo. You can see examples of this on the BBC link. Once you've clicked on a feed, you're then given the option of subscribing so that new content is downloaded automatically.

Finally, there are sites that will provide RSS feeds of blogs - even if the blog itself doesn't actually have its own feed. http://www.bloglines.com/ is one example.

When it comes to 2) a news reader, there are three options. You can choose to view the feeds in your browser. I'm not sure how Yahoo works but I imagine it's the same principle as IE. When you click on the Subscribe link in the feed itself, it will be added to the Feeds pane (similar to your Favourites pane).

You can also download a standalone reader with loads to choose from here (http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/Technical_Services/Cataloguing/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS/News_Readers/).

Finally, you can incorporate your own customised news reader in your own web page or blog. The easiest way to do this is to find someone you know who can master Flash and is prepared to design a custom feeder for you :wink

[MattR]

Well thank you Oldham.. at least SOME people are genuinely helpful around here :hearty


To be fair Vegy may have been offering himself as the servant :D

[mathare]

Scolded. Ooherr! :(I think you'll find you were Scoldhamed actually :)