News Feeds from Purdue University

What is an RSS feed?

RSS is an acronym for "Really Simple Syndication," and you can think of an RSS feed as a list of headlines from a particular web site. Every time the web site that's associated with that feed publishes a new article, the feed is updated to include the new headline. Most news sites and blogs will provide RSS feeds of their material.

The feed is located at a specific URL. By periodically checking a set of feed URLs, applications known as news aggregators are able to present you with a collection of all the most recent headlines from multiple sites.

If you'd like to learn more about RSS, Wikkipedia has a good article about feeds and the history of RSS.

How do I use an RSS feed?

To take advantage of a feed you'll need some sort of RSS reader or news aggregator software, and there are plenty of freely-available options for you to choose from.

If you want an RSS reader that isn't tied to a particular computer, try one of the free web services like My Yahoo! or the Google Reader.

There are also plenty of applications that are designed specifically to read RSS feeds, and they are available for just about any type of computer. Just check your favorite search engine for "RSS reader" and you should find something that will work for you.

In fact, the browser that you're using to read this page may include an RSS reader feature. The latest version of Safari for Mac OSX has excellent news reading features, Mozilla Firefox lets you create Live Bookmarks that will put the headlines from a feed into a drop-down menu on your bookmarks bar. The Opera browser includes a built-in RSS reader, as will Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.

Internet Explorer 6 users can view the information via Feedburner.