About RSS

News Feeds, or RSS as they are commonly called are somewhat new on the Web. To help you sort out all the particulars, we've created this page as a simple guide. If you have any questions, please contact us. We'll be happy to help.

What's A News Feed?
Wikipedia says it best, RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news web sites and weblogs. In a nutshell, you use a News Aggregator to subscribe to a news feed and then you will be notified whenever there's an update to this site. For more on the history of web site syndication, please read the Wikipedia entry on RSS

What's A News Aggregator
Again from Wikipedia, "A news aggregator is a software application or remotely hosted service that collects content from disparate news sources, allowing the user a single place of consumption and alerting the user of content updates." In other words, it's a piece of software (sometimes a web site) that allows you to subscribe to news feeds and then alert you when there is something new.

Where Do I Find A News Aggregator
Probably the best way to try out news feeds to see if you like them is to use the free service Bloglines. There's no software to install and the web site makes it easy to add and remove feeds.

If you'd prefer to install a dedicated client on your computer, Google has a complete list of news aggregators.

Tutorials
If you'd like a more detailed walk through of how to use news feeds, there are two excellent tutorials that should answer anything we may not have here. One is at C|Net and the other is at LockerGnome. Either one of those tutorials should cover just about everything you need to know.

Where Are Your Feeds?
Below is our News & events RSS feed:

News & Events: http://www.gcba.org/rss.html