“RSS Feeds” – eh?

If you just want the feed for The Badger Online, it is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheBadgerOnline

What is an RSS feed?

An RSS feed is a type of web page designed to be read by an aggregator (or just feed/RSS reader). The idea is that, rather than keep checking a website to see if it’s been updated, news is delivered to you as it’s published. Aggregators are like email software, but with news items.

News items are usually sorted chronologically and are grouped by the feed they were found in. Feed readers come in lots of different flavours, but essentially all do the same thing.

Which RSS reader should I use?

It really doesn’t matter that much. There are so many it can be bewildering, but it’s usually quite easy to change if you don’t like one.

It’s often easy to opt for an RSS reader that comes bundled with some software you already use. I, for example, use Thunderbird for my email, so I use the reader that’s built in with that. Alternatively I’ve dabbled with Google reader (as in the pic above) and found it to be very useful as it’s linked to the other Google products. If you use a smart-phone or PDA there are probably RSS readers for that too.

How can I subscribe to feeds?

Subscribing to feeds is usually just a matter of clicking on the little orange RSS icon. Sometimes you’ll need to copy a link and paste it into a box in your aggregator. This varies depending on the software you’re using, but generally should be dead simple.

To get you started, try adding the RSS feed for all articles on The Badger Online: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheBadgerOnline.

If you want to refine this feed (for just sport maybe, or comment…) head across to our full list of Badger Online RSS feeds.

Further afield though, most news sites and blogs offer RSS feeds nowadays. Hunt around for the little orange icon, or look for a page with more information on.

Hope this was useful,

Tom