What are RSS Feeds?

Do you find yourself when you browse the web whenever it might be (say in the evening after work or on a dreary Sunday afternoon) that you end up visiting a range of websites you nearly always look at when you go on-line such as checking the national news perhaps BBC, ITV or Sky News, latest articles on a photography website you look at often and many others? Do you find it a little time consuming to visit each site one by one, manually looking through what's new since you last browsed their pages? If you do, then RSS could really help you.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. That in itself doesn't tell the majority of people anything about them and in fact how useful they can be. Here's a quick guide that actually makes some sense of this great little technology.

Simply speaking a RSS feed is a condensed list of the latest articles on a website on any given subject which is updated to automatically cover those items that are new. Old articles are automatically removed after a set period (e.g. after the local event has passed.)

With some RSS readers, as you read them, they get crossed off the list of items you have already seen (Google Reader does this), so when you start browsing the web the next time you won't see articles you've already flagged up.

What is available?

Worthing Borough Council currently offers three RSS feeds:

• Latest council news
• Local Events in Worthing
• Current Job Vacancies

So if you are job hunting, save yourself some time and sign up to our job vacancies RSS feed, that way the latest opportunities are always shown, you won't miss any and you won't need to work out whether you have already seen the vacancy or not.

How to sign to sign up to a Worthing Borough Council RSS feed

To sign up to a RSS feed you will see a link like this on the news, local events and job vacancies page:

Viewing a RSS 2.0 Feed in Firefox

If you have Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2 or later or Safari 2 or later, you can make use of RSS feeds in your browser by simply clicking the links like those shown above and then following the instructions depending on the web browser you use:

Internet Explorer 7 and RSS Feeds

1. Browse to www.worthing.gov.uk
2. On the browser toolbar you will see a lit up RSS Feed Icon  which you need to click on
   
3. Choose from News, Events or Jobs in the drop down menu
4. Click Subscribe to this Feed
   
5. Type the name you want to call your subscription e.g. Worthing Council Job Vacancies and the folder you want to put it into
6. To view your subscription, click the Favourites button  and then click 'Feeds.'

Firefox and RSS Feeds

1. Browse to www.worthing.gov.uk
2. On your browser web address bar you will see a RSS Feed Icon which you need to click on:
   
   
3. Choose the application to subscribe with, by default Live Bookmarks uses Firefox creates a special bookmark that updates when the RSS feed changes. We recommend this option if you are new to RSS feeds.
   
4. Click Subscribe Now
5. Type in a name for your new subscription and the location of where to save the feed. The default Bookmarks Toolbar is the most useful as it adds it to your Firefox browser window rather than in a menu.
   
   
   

Third Party RSS Readers (Internet Explorer 6 Users)

There are also third party RSS readers for those who don't have one of the above browsers (such as Internet Explorer 6) or for those who want something different. The following are our recommended ways to subscribe to our RSS feeds although other options do exist:

• Bloglines
• Google Reader
  
• My Yahoo!
• NewsGator

There are also desktop (non web based) RSS readers for the major platforms.

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