RSS Feeds

What are News Feeds?

News feeds keep you up to date, alerting you to updated content on the websites you are interested in. For example you can be kept updated on all Cumberland news without having to come back to the News section of this website.

Feeds are also known as RSS. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, the most common being, 'Really Simple Syndication'. Essentially these are just web pages read by computers rather than people.

How do I use them?

To start using them you will need a News Reader. Some browsers have this already built in and will allow you to subscribe instantly. Often you will have to download an additional application to view them. Some recommendations are made further down this page. Browsers with the functionality already in place will allow you to view your subscriptions from any computer. The disadvantage of a downloadable application is that it will mean you will only be able to read your feeds from the computer you installed the application on.

Once you have chosen a News Reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want it to receive. Wherever you see this symbol it means that there are related feeds you can subscribe to.

If you click on the RSS button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the feed into your News Reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your News Reader.

Browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari, lend a helping hand by automatically checking for feeds when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This makes subscribing much easier. For more details on these, please visit their respective websites.

How do I get a news reader?

The most important thing to remember here is that there are different News Readers intended for different Operating Systems so it is important you select the correct one for your system. There are many to choose from (too many to list) but here are some examples:

Windows

• Newz Crawler
• FeedDemon
• Awasu

Mac OS X

• Newsfire
• NetNewsWire

Web

• Bloglines
• FeedZilla
• NewsGator
• Microsoft Live
• My Yahoo!

Browser

• Mozilla Firefox

Other News Readers

• Google