RSS FAQs
- How do I subscribe?
- How do I start using RSS feeds?
- How do I get a news reader?
- Additional information
- Using Mozilla Firefox to create a 'Live Bookmark' using RSS
How do I subscribe?
RSS readers and podcast clients allow you to subscribe to multiple feeds and provide a one-stop summary of all new content available on the sites you've subscribed to. You can subscribe to a feed by either cutting and pasting or clicking and dragging the feed URL into your RSS reader or podcast client. Try Google Reader or Apple's iTunes to get you started. Otherwise, simply search for 'RSS readers' or 'podcast clients' and follow your nose.
How do I start using RSS feeds?
The first thing you need is something called a news reader. This is a piece of software that checks RSS feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added to them.
How do I get a news reader?
You can get both web-based and downloadable news readers. Web-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable news readers let you store them on your main computer. This is similar to the difference between Hotmail which you can look at from any computer, and Outlook, which is stored on your own computer.
It's up to you which you prefer, and most news reader providers offer basic or trial versions for free. Here's a selection:
For Windows (downloadable)
Newz Crawler - www.newzcrawler.com
FeedDemon - www.feeddemon.com
Awasu - www.awasu.com
For Mac OS X
Newsfire - www.newsfirerss.com
NetNewsWire - www.newsgator.com/individuals/netnewswire
Web-based news readers
Bloglines - www.bloglines.com
My Yahoo! - my.yahoo.com
NewsGator - www.newsgator.com/ngs
(Lonely Planet is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.)
Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what you want to receive in it by finding and subscribing to the relevant RSS feeds. For example, if you want the latest on what's happening in Lonely Planet's digital realm, you'd go to our Inside Digital blog and look for the orange RSS button on the left-hand side.
If you click on the button, the RSS feed page will appear. You can subscribe to it in various ways.
For instance, you could drag the web address of the RSS feed into your news reader, or you could copy and paste the web address into your news reader. It's called 'subscribing', but you don't need to pay or give your personal details. Just set it up, then sit back and enjoy as your news reader does all the work.
Most sites that offer RSS feeds use a similar orange RSS button, but some may just have a normal weblink to the feed.
Additional information
Browser support
Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for RSS feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. Subscribing to feeds is a breeze. Check out their websites for more details.
www.mozilla.com/support
www.apple.com/safari
www.opera.com
(Lonely Planet is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.)
Using Mozilla Firefox to create a 'Live Bookmark'
using RSS
When you visit a web page and you see an orange icon at the far right of the address bar it means that the page contains an RSS feed that you can subscribe to (if you're using an old version of the browser this icon may appear in the status bar in the bottom right).
You can add the feed by clicking on the orange icon and subscribing. If there's more than one RSS feed, Firefox shows a list and you pick one.
The 'Add Live Bookmark' dialogue box appears. A Live Bookmark is similar to a standard folder you might create in your bookmarks list, but instead of containing manually collected bookmarks, it will contain live links from the RSS feed that are updated automatically.
You might like to add the Live Bookmarks to the Bookmarks toolbar folder, normally shown under the navigation toolbar, so you can view recent content with just one click.
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