MHS Training Team

What is RSS?

RSS stands for "Really Simmple Sindication". Don't let it's name put you off because RSS is a really useful tool for staying up to date with information on the web. Lots of sites have RSS or news feeds and they alert you when a site has new content. This means that you don't have to keep going back to a site to see if it has changed. You can get the latest news items from numerous websites in one place. This saves you time and makes it a lot easier to stay up to date.

RSS Videos

RSS in Plain English (by CommonCraft)

Provides a good overview of RSS, why it is really useful and how to go about using it.

How do I use RSS?

The good thing about RSS is that it is pretty easy to use. Basically you need to do two things:

1) Get yourself a news reader

A news reader is a piece of software that checks the RSS feed for new items and lets you read the latest items. It is a bit like your email inbox but instead of showing you your latest emails it shows you your latest news items.

There are plenty of freely available news readers out there to use, including:

 
Google Reader (My personal favourite)
 
 
My Yahoo.
 

2) Subscribe to an RSS feed

Sites that have RSS news feeds usually have the RSS logo (shown below). Clicking on this logo lets you subscribe to that feed in your chosen reader.

The RSS Icon

When you click on the RSS feed icon one of two things will happen:

1) You will see the one click subsribe buttons (shown below). Click the button to your reader to subsribe

or

2) You will see a screen showing some code. If you a screen full of code simply copy the web address of that page (e.g. "www.samplepage.com") and in your reader look for a button such as "Add subscription" and paste the web address of the feed. (The following image is from Google Reader)