Saturday, 20 August 2005
The CRGC web site has been modified to include a new feature called an "RSS feed". "RSS" is an abbreviation for "Really Simple Syndication", or "Rich Site Summary", depending upon which article you read. More information about RSS can be found here, but in general the end user loads a piece of software called an "RSS reader" or "RSS aggregator" on the user's PC or Macintosh. The CRGC webmaster posts What's New article headlines and a one or two sentence description on the CRGC web site, and the user's RSS reader automatically checks periodically to find out if there is anything new. If there is, the RSS reader makes it available to the user in some simple, usually browser-like, format. This means that you do not need to visit the CRGC web site to find out what's new at the club. Your RSS reader will do it for you. An RSS reader can also be used to monitor news feeds (The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, CNN, USA Today, The New York Times, CNET, Reuters, the BBC, and dozens of others) and blogs (thousands of them, on every conceivable topic).
An RSS feed reader may be free, or quite inexpensive (about $20 to $30). If you are interested, you can find more references from Google here. Or you can find a list of RSS readers here. A good and inexpensive reader is FeedDemon. Some web browsers, like OmniWeb (Macintosh only), include an RSS feed reader, while others like Firefox allow RSS feed reader extensions. It is rumored that Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 7 will include a feed reader as well when it is released. Some e-mail software, like Thunderbird also includes a reader with the software.
You can point your RSS reader at the CRGC web site (http://www.canbyrodandgun.com/) by copying the URL to your reader, or your reader may automatically detect that the CRGC web site has an RSS feed when you visit it. If your reader requires that it be told about the feed file itself, then enter "http://www.canbyrodandgun.com/WhatsNew.xml" in the reader's address line. See your reader's documentation for the easiest way to add a feed to your monitoring list.