RSS Feed

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. Essentially, it's another term for a news feed. RSS is a means by which content from selected websites is syndicated and delivered to your computer without your having to continually revisit those sites searching for new content.

A news feed (also referred to as an RSS feed) provides a listing of a website's recently-updated stories and is delivered to users at regular intervals by a news reader. Users subscribe to the news feeds of their choice, which transmit a list of story headlines, summaries or excerpts, and links to the complete text of stories from the originating website.

The first step in using RSS feeds will be downloading a news reader, also called a news aggregator. Much like programs such as Outlook, Hotmail and Entourage are used to read e-mail, a news reader is a piece of software that is needed to read news feeds. A variety of news readers, such as News Gator, are available free of charge. News readers differ in how they look and function, so experts suggest testing several readers before selecting one.

RSS support is also included in current versions of Mozilla's Firefox web browser and Thunderbird mail client.

To read RSS feeds from an internet connected mobile phone, visit MobileRSS.net.

Once you have a news reader, simply select the RSS feeds from various Web sites that you would like your reader to track. The news reader you have downloaded will give you instructions. Many sites will indicate that a feed is available by using an icon with RSS, XML or RDF.

We are currently rebuilding our news feed system.  Be sure to check this page in the future for information on how to subscribe to the Alumni Association news feed.