McKownville
Improvement Association
RSS subscriptions, readers, etc - brief explanation
A logo like this, or the RSS acronym
image, indicates that the web page or the site provides a
syndication service through an xml file included on the web server.
As long as the website slave adds the titles, or a brief summary of
new items to this file, corresponding to new paragraphs or pages
published on the site, you are able to get this summary list of the
items automatically, and see if there is anything new that interests
you, without having repeatedly to check the website itself.
So for this website, when a new meeting flyer is posted, or an email
announcement added, or a news item posted, the summary will be added
to the RSS xml file list and you can obtain notification of this if
you subscribe* to our RSS feed. Older items are removed so the list
will probably contain no more than six to ten of them at one time.
There's a good explanation of RSS at Gizmo's freeware page on What is RSS all about?
Some web browsers include an RSS reader; or you can perhaps add the
RSS link for any site you wish to your bookmarks, and use that to
view the list of items. There are add-on applications for Firefox
and similar browsers which have enhanced capabilities for sorting,
filtering and automatically updating the feed information from many
websites.
Some email client programs (Thunderbird for one) also include an RSS
reader.
Alternatively you can download a standalone RSS reader program. Another website page at Gizmo's freeware
includes a list, with links to informative reviews, of some free RSS
readers. There's another set of comparisons accessible at alternativeto.net
*unlike email announcements, subscription to an RSS feed requires no
sign-up, no email address, and is anonymous. It can be stopped
(unsubscribed) whenever you want. There's no spam, and no ads, (at
least until you access the actual web pages linked in an RSS feed
list, if they host ads; there are no ads on mckownville.org).
The Gizmo's freeware page on RSS explains this
clearly in the section "Why use RSS?"
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