About RSS Feeds

With the arrival of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) you can be directly notified of updates to your favourite websites via news feeds that arrive at a single source: an RSS Reader.

So, rather than merely stumbling upon the latest developments and news by chance, you can get these items pushed to your desktop, PDA or mobile phone. You can then read a quick summary of the story, and if you wish, go to the provider's website to read the full report.

How do I use RSS?

You will need to have access to an RSS reader - some mobile phones have these as built in software, whilst on a PC / Mac you will have to install one (there are many free desktop readers available). Modern web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari or Internet Explorer 7 now also come with RSS capabilities installed.

If you prefer, you can also sign up to a free web-based service such as Netvibes instead - if you then set this as one of your homepages, you will always be aware of what is happening on your favourite websites. The advantage of this method is that you can sign into the service and access your feeds from any computer connected to the internet.

Subscribing to a feed

For our feed, you would need to paste this URL into your reader: http://www.nightingaleassociates.com/feed.xml then whenever a news item or project is added to the site, you would be notified of this update.

How do I know if a site has RSS feeds?

Look for an icon in the address bar, or RSS text link somewhere on the homepage of the site. In the Firefox or Safari browsers for example, you will see an icon as above to the right of the address bar - simply click on this to access the feed, and you can then copy and paste the URL to your RSS Reader to be notified when it is updated.