Over the last few weeks you may have noticed that RSS feed logos have appeared on www.psychicsahar.com and http://www.ps-magazine.com/, and www.psychicpodcasts.com. The reason for this note is to explain what RSS feeds are and why they are very potentially very useful.

RSS means 'Really Simple Syndication' and the feed provides a means of linking content from the Website to specialized software. There are two main uses of RSS, firstly to deliver information about Podcasts and secondly to deliver information about articles, or news items. This means that you would be able to have direct access to newly posted articles in PS magazine, and newly uploaded podcasts without having to visit the Web Sites.

In practice, most people use iTunes to access Podcasts. Other specialized Podcasting programs are also used, but by only a few people; so we will ignore Podcasts in this note. Accessing Podcasts has been explained in previous article in this magazine.

RSS News Feeds

Thanks to pioneering work by the BBC, and a few other news Websites, the use of RSS feeds to link to “Newsreaders” programs is becoming popular. 

Once you have installed a Newsreader program you can link to the RSS feed on www.ps-magazine.com and be notified of any new articles that appear on the Magazine. You can also use the Newsreader to link to other RSS feeds, so example to keep track of other information, the BBC for example provides RSS feeds for news about golf, tennis and other sports, in addition to its feeds about regular news.

The BBC have a useful guide to RSS feeds: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm

Newsreaders:

If you use Firefox [www.mozilla.com/firefox/central] as your Web browser (as I do), it is easy to add Wiss RSS 2.0 as an extension; this Newsreader integrates well with Firefox and is free.

If you use Windows Explorer as your Web browser, life is slightly more complex. We have used a new RSS Newsreader called Snarfer, it’s free and seems to work well, download:  http://www.snarfware.com/download.htm, then copy http://www.psychicsahar.com/artman/publish/rss.xml into Snarfer. There are a number of other Newsreader programs, all work on the same principles.

I hope you can enjoy the convenience of RSS, it means that you no longer have to log on to a Site to check whether there is a new story or article.

Best wishes

Sahar

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