About RSS Feeds
Depending on your preference, RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication', 'Rich Site Summary' or 'RDF Site Summary' [where RDF stands for 'Resource Description Framework' - just to make things clearer... Another case of acronyms gone mad].
Expanding the acronym may not leave you any the wiser, but RSS itself just might. What RSS allows is the news content (known as news feeds) from a web site to be displayed as linked headlines on your computer. The advantage of this is that you can monitor the news content of a number of web sites without actually having to visit them to see if new and interesting information has been posted.
On the home page of this site you can see this in action with a number of news feeds displayed in the lower half of the right hand column. These feeds have been chosen because they are highly relevant to the new technologies and education emphasis of this web site.
As well as making use of RSS feeds, this site also provides a feed, in this case for its blog and news columns. RSS news feeds are written in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and you can see what the feed looks like by clicking on the XML button at the foot of this page (or the home page).
There are two ways you can make use of this feed. If you have appropriate technical prowess, you can include the feed in your own web site by pointing to http://www.steeg.co.uk/rss.xml.You are more than welcome to use the feed in this way, provided you don't publish the full text of articles. Please properly reference either "Torben's Blog " or "Torben Steeg Consultancy and Research News Feed" as the source.
Alternatively, you can use a news aggregator. This will display the news feed either in a separate window or in a sidebar of your browser. The Opera browser includes news aggregation as standard and there is a choice of RSS extensions for the Mozilla browser family. If you are brave enough (or care sufficiently little for the integrity of your computer) to still be using Internet Explorer, try searching the tucows web site for 'RSS'. A popular aggregator is feedreader - though I've never used it so can't vouch for it.
