RSS

What is RSS?

The Reader is a tool to make life easy. Instead of having to go and check all of your favorite blogs and news feeds to see what has changed since you where there last an RSS reader does the leg work for you. Whenever you open it up it contains all the latest news, blog posts, website changes etc. The massively popular pod-casting system is essentially RSS feeds with MP3 files as the media content.

The feed is the source of the news. You may often see orange icons (like in the right hand side of the address bar of this page), clicking on these icons reveals a link which you can use to allow your reader to subscribe to your feed.

How would I use RSS?

Google and Yahoo both provide free feed readers for their users. These fully functioned readers allow you to subscribe to feeds and view the content. Many applications such as Email clients and browsers have feed readers or aggregators built into them. So you probably have one a few clicks away from you right now.

Do I need an RSS feed?

It is good for users and search engine rankings to regularly update your content. RSS is a natural way to keep users automatically up to date with your latest changes. Also it helps to create and stimulate a user base, as every time you make an update all the subscribers are drawn back to your site.

What can METHOD IT do?

We at METHOD IT can work with your organization to identify data sources for feed content and generate the necessary feeds for your users to subscribe to. We can provide both automatic feeds which can add items to the news feeds based on particular events or changes and Manual feeds which you can control via some form of content management system.

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