By OU Editor Ashley Schroeder
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from Web sites that interest you. Instead of going to every site to see if a new article or blog post has been added or updated, you can use RSS to notify you every time there’s something new.
Paul Queneau told me about how he got the scoop on a photo call when his RSS news reader showed a publication’s blog had just updated with a request for specific wildlife images.
Generally, you need a program called a news reader (or news aggregator) to collect RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read. A number of free and commercial news aggregators are available for download.
Here are a few of the available readers:
Personalized homepages, such as iGoogle or My Yahoo! also gather RSS feeds. Some browsers, like Firefox or Internet Explorer 8, support RSS automatically.
Generally speaking, you copy or enter the URL (address) of the RSS feed page into your news reader. Each headline in the reader will link you back to the full article.
You can also read RSS feeds on handheld devices. Viigo is a Blackberry RSS reader that can import subscriptions from Google Reader. Litefeeds also lets you synchronize with your online subscriptions. These are both free applications. For iPhone users, check out Mac’s reader or the free NetNewsWire. A simple Google search will also turn up a variety of other RSS news readers.
And remember, include Outdoors Unlimited (https://owaa.org/ou/feed) in your RSS feed! ◊
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