RSS Feeds
Other RSS feeds
- Cardinal Cam: Podcast (m4v video) | Notification
- From the President
- From the Provost
- Cardinal Lawyer, official blog of School of Law Dean Jim Chen
More about RSS
What is RSS?
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a method of publishing headlines, links, and article summaries that appear on Web sites. By using a special news reader, you can subscribe to news "feeds" of particular interest and be notified when new content becomes available on a Web site.
How is RSS different from regular Web browsing?
RSS allows you to focus on topics and articles that are most interesting to you. You can read article introductions or summaries before clicking through to a Web page, which allows you to make the most of your browsing time.
RSS readers can also alert you when content has been added to the Web sites you have subscribed to, much like how e-mail readers notify you when a new message arrives.
How do I use RSS?
To use RSS, you'll need an RSS reader, which combines a web browser with a tool that summarizes the content of subscribed news feeds.
There are many RSS readers available. Some are installed as applications on your computer, while others can be used through a web browser.
For example, the SharpReader RSS Aggregator for Windows computers is easy to use and free. You'll need to get the free Microsoft .NET framework before installing SharpReader. An extensive list of popular news readers for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix computers is available from Wikipedia.
Screen shot of the free SharpReader news reader for Windows. Full-size screen shot
RSS readers have also been created as extensions of browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, a free Web browser which is available for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX computers. The Sage RSS reader for Firefox can be downloaded from the Firefox Web site.
Screen shot of the free Sage news reader for Firefox. Full-size screen shot
Web-based RSS readers are also available. Bloglines and Feedster are among the more popular web-based RSS readers.
What are the other uses for RSS?
If you maintain a Web page, you can set your page up so that it is automatically updated by an RSS feed originating on another computer. You can use RSS to share content automatically between several computer systems and Web sites. For example, U of L Web authors can use our news RSS feeds to add U of L news to their department Web sites.
How do I subscribe to U of L RSS feeds?
The exact procedure will vary depending upon the RSS reader you're using. In general, you'll follow one of the links listed on the RSS feeds page, which will bring you to a summary of recent U of L news content.
Once you're looking at a feed of interest, you can copy the URL, paste it into your RSS reader, and hit "Subscribe." For browser-based RSS readers, you can subscribe by adding the news RSS feed to a special folder in your bookmarks.
Where can I learn more about RSS?
For more information about RSS, please see a general overview of RSS (Wikipedia), a basic tutorial on RSS feeds (Software Garden) and a list of popular news reader programs (Wikipedia).