RSS+-+Google+Reader

Do you have a set of web pages that you check regularly? Wouldn't it be nice if you could have something that told you whether a website has been updated so you don't have to check? What about if it showed you the changes too? Then you could read through the new items like an newspaper, keeping up to date with all the news YOU find interesting.

Essentially this is what RSS attempts to do, or more to the point, what you can do by using RSS.

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What's an RSS?
[|Wikipedia RSS Definition] RSS usually stands for "Real Simple Sindication" (other meanings as well, but the sentiment is the same). It is a way for participating websites to store their information in a standard way so that computers can see what is new. To do this, the first step is for the person who made the original website to create a new page called a "Feed". The feed has all the same informaiton that gets displayed on the real website when an update happens, but is broken up into chunks so that a computer knows the time, the author and the article contents.

The second step is for the regular readers of the website to "subscribe" to the feed. This means that the person wanting to know the information on the website sets up an RSS Reader keep checking the feed page for any new updates.

What's an RSS Reader ?
An RSS Reader is the organiser of all the feeds you want to follow. It is usually a program on your computer or possibly even a webpage like [|Google Reader]. The reader is responsible for continually checking each feed and reporting to you if any of the websites have changed. This frees you up from checking all the websites individually and gives you one place to look for any updates.

RSS to Websites
Instead of using a dedicated news reader, you can also place RSS feeds into websites. You would have seen this in action already each time you go to the [|St Luke's portal]. See the news? That's provided by the ABC. We have set up our home page to subscribe to the feed for ABC news. In this way our home site becomes more informative, and the ABC gets extra traffic for the articles that people click onto; a win win for both parties.

Inside these wikispaces you can also embed RSS feeds. I did that in the Delicious page previously because Delicious provides an RSS feed for each type of tag. Your challenge for today is to find a page with an RSS feed on it, and add it to this wikispace to make this site more useful. Either add one below, or to an existing page.

[|34 ways to use an RSS feed]

Bundaberg News from ABC
rss url="http://www.abc.net.au/news/indexes/widebay/rss.xml" link="true" number="10"

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