About RSS

RSS is a common and popular format that allows you to receive regular updates about new content on a website without having to visit the site itself. This can save immense amounts of time, as you don't have to reload the whole site just to see if there's anything new. In fact, you can check several sites in just a few seconds, whenever you want. RSS entries appear as headlines along with a brief summary of any new content for the website you are interested in. If you want to read the whole web page, you can simply click on the headline to go to the actual site. Some RSS entries contain the whole text of the page so you can read it straight away.

RSS is delivered via a 'feed' to your browser, or a separate program, or even certain email clients. It's very easy to set up and use an RSS feed. Many websites display an orange icon if they provide an RSS feed, which looks like this: Or you may see an orange block with the letters "XML" inside.

Here are some options you might consider to get started:

Dedicated Programs

There are many free standalone RSS programs out there. One of the easiest that I have found is Feedreader.

Internet Explorer 7

Good news! This has a built-in RSS reader. You can find it in the Favorites Center (side panel). Click on the big yellow star next to the first open tab at the top to open the side panel then press the Feeds button. When you visit a site with a feed available, look out for the orange icon lit on the toolbar. Pressing it will show you the feed and offer a button to 'subscribe' to it.

Firefox 2

Although this allows you to subscribe to feeds by clicking on the orange icon when it appears in the address bar of the browser, it only allows you to view the feed headlines as a list of bookmarks. You get a button added to the toolbar to view them. Since the summary for each headline is not shown, this approach (called 'Live Bookmarks') seems inferior to other methods. A dedicated program (see above) is a much better solution.

Opera 9

This browser has a built-in RSS feed reader mechanism. Just click on the orange icon when it appears in the address bar of the browser.

Netscape 9

Since it will be based on Firefox, please read the entry for that above. However, this official news item about its development states it will have "more standardized support for newsfeeds (a.k.a. Live Bookmarks)". What this means in practice remains to be seen.

Thunderbird 2

This email client can also show RSS feeds, but I gave up using it to check feeds at home as it seemed to stop working after a while. But that was a while ago, so you might wish to try the current version yourself, should you be using Thunderbird already for your emails.

Note: The physical address for the NEUPG website RSS feed is below. You may need to copy and paste this into a suitable reader.

http://neupg.procureweb.ac.uk/updates.xml

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Last updated: 17th June 2008. Coded by Chris Hester. Original NEUPC logo by James Welbourn.
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