What is RSS

RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication'. This means that the latest news items from your favourite website are downloaded straight to your computer.

The web page you see when you click on the orange RSS button is an RSS feed - a special kind of web page, designed to be read by computers rather than people.

RSS allows you to see when sites from all over the internet have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and articles (or even audio files, photographs or video) in one place, as soon as they are published, without having to remember to visit each site every day.

How do I start using RSS feeds?

What you need is something called a news reader. This is a piece of software that checks RSS feeds from websites of your choice and lets you read any new articles that have been added to them.

Different news readers work on different operating systems, so you will need to choose one that will work with your computer.

Once you have chosen a news reader, you need to decide what content you want to receive, by finding and subscribing to the relevant RSS feeds. For example, if you would like the latest CAFOD news, simply click on the orange RSS box in the blue news bar on the home page.

Depending on news reader you have you will either have to copy the URL of the RSS feed page into a specific field (for example in a window you get when you click something like Add feed) or you can just drag the orange box and drop it into the area where your RSS feeds are displayed (e.g Firefox).

News feeders for download

Windows
Newz Crawler
FeedDemon
Awasu
Mac OS X
Newsfire
NetNewsWire
Web
Bloglines
My Yahoo!
NewsGator
Browser
Mozilla Firefox

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