Online Technology Journal

About this RSS News Feed

What is an RSS News Feed?

RSS = Rich Site Summary (or for those on more intimate terms - Really Simple Syndication).

It is an XML file that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndicaton. RSS feeds may show headlines with or without summaries of articles.

How the RSS Feed was included on this web page.

Many online news publications and bloggers supply an RSS feed that can be included on your website. This can be useful for aggregating news material on a certain topic or viewpoint on your website.

 For a free reader to include on this site, I went to:

http://www.rssfeedreader.com/

After registering with a name and email address, I was asked to log in. I then selected the RSS Feed sources. For this site, I selected two RSS Feeds -BBC World News and Yahoo News (RSS & Blogging). I guess this would be for the worldly techno-geek. The web page shows only one feed at a time. (Refresh the page [F5] to see the other feed.)

After selecting the feed, you are given the option to choose behaviors of the feeds, such as whether to include a descripton or just headlines, etc.

Next, you select the formatting options for how the feeds will appear on your site. The options are somewhat limited, but give some asthetic control.

You then click on the RSS Feed button and the RSS code is generated based on the selections you've made.

You can choose Javascript or PHP. I used Javascript. I simply copied the code they provided and pasted into this page.

I created this page using Macromedia Dreamweaver and inserted a table onto the page. To add the code to my page, I went to the Code view and pasted the code into a table cell (i.e. <td><script language=javascript src="http://www.rssfeedreader.com....</td>). You won't see the RSS Feed in the design view. It will be viewable when you upload to the server.

In this example, I subscribed to an RSS Feed from my website so that news articles could be automatically be updated on my site.

You may also subscribe to RSS Feeds for your personal use on your computer. To do this you would use a program called an aggregator or RSS reader. RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website. The aggregator collects these feeds from various websites and provide it to you in a simple form on your computer.