About RSS

An easy way of keeping up to date with what's happening.

You'll notice that there is a new icon on the screen - the RSS feed logo:

You may have seen this on other sites, and wondered what it is.

RSS is an easy way for us to help you track changes to this site's content. All changed content pages on the site are logged in an RSS feed. If you use a suitable RSS reader to subscribe to the feed, it will notify you whenever the feed is changed by pages changing.

In future, we will extend this feature so that new videos, new books, and new products also appear in the RSS feed.

We've not forgotten those of you who don't want to wrestle with new technologies, either - underneath the icon, you'll see a "view as web page" link that will give you a sensible view of the feed from within your normal browser even without an RSS reader - though of course, this can't automatically notify you of changes in the way that an RSS reader can.

Most RSS readers are free, and there are readers built into Internet Explorer 7. Most other recent popular browsers either include an RSS reader, or have one as an addon.

Assuming for the moment you're using IE7, to subscribe to our feed, you can either:

• RIGHT-click on the RSS feed icon, and select the menu option "subscribe in default aggregator"

or

• LEFT-click the RSS feed icon, and when the feed is displayed, click on the "subscribe to this feed" link near the top of the page.

Once you are subscribed, you can manually view your feed subscriptions by clicking on the "Favourites Center" - the gold star top left in the IE screen, and selecting the "feeds" tab at the top of the column that appears on the left of IE. Right-clicking a feed and selecting "Properties" allows you to tell IE how often it should check the feed, and in the "advanced", allows you to set whether it should play a sound, or pop up a notice when it sees that the feed has changed.

Other RSS readers have similar mechanisms.

If you have a different RSS reader installed, and set it up to be the default reader (also called an aggregator), then IE's "subscribe in default aggregator" should make that reader automatically start and subscribe in a single operation.

A few links for those who want to know more:

If you'd rather use Google's reader (which means that you can use it at any PC you sit at, not just your own), there is information (and a video tutorial) on the Google Reader home page.

Wikipedia has a somewhat dry article on rss readers on it's Aggregator page, and a list of aggregators on it's aggregator list.

For the technical, we're currently creating the feed as RSS 2.0, and plan to feed Atom in the future, The feed generator is custom coded, in order to integrate with the site's various Content Management systems.

If you have any problems with the site's RSS feeds, please feel free to contact us, but the easiest way will be to raise the issue in the Probems section of the forum.