Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a new technology that is a format for easily sharing information, such as headlines, articles, news items, or blog entries over the web. It allows any content or website publisher (such as TMC Youth) to create their own news feed, which people all over the world can subscribe to. RSS is becoming very main-stream and is used on blogs, corporate web sites, and news websites such as The Christian Science Monitor, CNN, Yahoo, Globe and Mail, and the New York Times
Here are a few reasons why you would want to use RSS:
A very good question. We use our RSS feed to let you know about all the the latest happenings at TMC Youth. Our feed includes news updates, articles, podcasts, new entries from our traveler's healing blog, entries from our Chaplain's blog, and updates on how our church continues to spread its wings as a church of healers. It covers just about everything that is new on a daily basis to our website. We want to keep you informed, and RSS is the tool we're using to keep everyone up-to-date.
Perhaps the best way to explain RSS is just to give a simple example. Every morning when I wake up I like to read news headlines, and I like reading news from a diverse
range of topics. I start off by reading news about the lastest and greatest stuff in the tech industry, then I progress to reading my favorite Dilbert comics, and then I catchup
on everything that is new in business and in the world. Prior to the invention of RSS I was getting my news by visiting around 6–7 different websites every morning, and having
to filter through advertisements and poor navigation to find the content I was looking for. RSS was the tool that simplified my morning news reading by 600%. Now I get my morning
news through a free program called NetNewsWire Lite 2.0 for Mac OS X. There are of course similar programs for Microsoft Windows
such as Feedreader.
Now as you can see here in the left column are a list of all the RSS feeds I subscribe to and I've placed all the news that relates to the world news in it's own folder, and have subscribed to a number of feeds, including the Globe and Mail, and the Christian Science Monitor (my two favorite newspapers). On the top of the right column, is a list of all the recent news headlines that are included in the Globe and Mail RSS feed, and below it are the details for whatever I've clicked on. In this particular case, a story about more hardships in Gaza.
I can quickly scan articles of interest based on the headlines in the top right pane, and once I've found a headline that looks interesting I just click on it and it provides me with a short description of what that article is about. If I want further information I just click on the name of the article and it opens the article in my internet browser. Once I have read a news item it becomes grayed out so I know which articles I have read and which I have not read, and the best part of it all is that it downloads new articles as soon as they are available so I'm always up to date with what's current (hence the term syndicated). Give it a try! You'll love it!
There are a few things you will need in order to view our rss feed
Copy this URL and paste it into your favorite RSS feed reader, or click on it to see it on FeedBurner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TmcyouthChristianScienceRssFeed
Below is a list of RSS readers that can be downloaded and installed on a variety of platforms. Some are free, and some are not, but you should certainly be able to find something that you like.
