Using RSS

RSS is a format for syndicating news stories and the content of news sites. The James Martin 21st Century School RSS feeds deliver the latest news from around the school, and it's daughter institutes. RSS keeps you in the know by showing you summarised information feeds filtered by you.

In general, the first thing you need is something called a news reader or a feed reader. This is a piece of software that checks RSS feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added to them. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you either download your e-mail, or keep it on a web-based service.

Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want to receive by finding and subscribing to the relevant RSS feeds. For example, if you would like the entire Oxford University Press Office newsfeed, simply visit the University's homepage or the News and Events page and you will notice an orange RSS button.

If you click on the button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including dragging the URL of the RSS feed into your news reader, dragging the button icon into your reader, or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader.

Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera, Safari and now Internet Explorer 7 , automatically check RSS feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This can make subscribing to RSS feeds much easier.

For a large list of standalone RSS readers, please see the RSS Compendium.