In this series you will learn how to organize and keep track of new information as it becomes available in the Community.  While you can always come to the web site and browse for new information, there are other ways to stay up to date.

In case you missed it, read:

• Part 1: Email Notifications
• Part 2: Using "Favorites"

Part 3: RSS Subscriptions

What is RSS?

RSS is an agreed upon "standard" for publishing information.  This standardized format allows people with information (like us) to easily share that information with others.  A news item in an RSS feed will always have a Title, a Link, a Description, an Author, and a Published date.  This lets web site developers and software companies create programs that automatically pull in information from web sites in an aggregated way.  It lets individuals pull in information from their favorite news sources without having to visit individual web sites.

If you go to a major web portal like Yahoo!, MSN, or AOL you will see that there are a variety of new headlines being displayed.  You might see sports, market, or entertainment headlines that you can click on for more information.  You can add additional headlines for other things that you might be interested in, such as Music or Food.  The Corrections Community makes its information available to other web sites and to the general public in the same way that CNN might make its headlines available to AOL or MSN. For example, I was able to add headlines from the "Thinking About Corrections" news blog to my MSN start page. See my example.

How do I use RSS? 

There are a wide variety of personal RSS programs that will go to all of the web sites you get news from, automatically grab all the new information, and display this information to you in one spot.  This way you do not need to go to every single web site all the time. There are many free personal RSS aggregators available like Bloglines and NewsGator.

Adding an RSS feed to your personal aggregator will be different for each type of program, so read the instructions for the program you choose. Basically, with all of them, you will need to copy the address (URL) of the RSS feed into the program and the program will take care of the rest. 

It takes a little work to get used to using RSS, but once you get it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it. Look for the following icons and text on our web site and other web sites. They represent links to the addresses you will add to your program.

Text you might see: RSS, Atom, Subscribe, Feed, Syndication

Icons you might see (They are typically orange):

Look for RSS subscription options for the Corrections Community in the following areas of this site:

• News Blogs (all or individually)
• Discussion Forums (individually)
• Tags (individually)
• File Libraries (Individually)

The Future of RSS

Like many web technologies, RSS will likely change, but the concept of syndicating and subscribing to content will likely be around for very long time.  The next version of Internet Explorer (soon to be released) will have a built-in RSS aggregator. Other popular browses like FireFox and Opera already have RSS built into them.