NEWS FEEDS: What they are and how to use them
Welcome to our RSS news feed page.
This page offers some basic information about setting up your own RSS news feed, which should only take a couple of minutes.
Note that there is no charge for subscribing to RSS feeds. The only cost is the (optional) purchase of a downloadable software application, and the few minutes of your time it will take. (RSS, by the way stands, for Really Simple Syndication.)
News feeds are available for the main sections of Defense-aerospace.com:
and can be reached by clicking on the orange logo in the section’s headline on our Home Page, or at the top right-hand corner of each section’s summary page.
What are News Feeds?
RSS news feeds send you a message (generally the headline) whenever new content is added to a web page you have selected.
How to use news feeds
1. Select a news reader, which is a software program that checks RSS feeds from the websites you have selected.
Many different news readers are available; some are accessed using a browser or an e-mail program, and some are downloadable applications.
2. Choose the content you want by going to the summary page of each section of Defense-aerospace.com, and clicking on the orange button in the top right-hand corner.
You can now subscribe to that section’s news feed in several ways, including by dragging the URL (or web address) of the feed into your news reader, or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader.
3. Watch as the news comes to you
Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This can make subscribing to feeds much easier. For more details on these, please check their websites.
Other programs send you a message each time an item is added to a web page to which you subscribed.
In both cases, the news comes to you immediately it is updated on the page, without the need to visit individual websites.
Not clear enough? Need more explanations?
Visit ProBlogger’s “What is RSS” page for a comprehensive (and straightforward) explanation of RSS feeds and subscriptions, including an entertaining step-by-step video.
