You can use RSS feeds to be notified as soon as new content is added to a website. Common Craft made this great video, RSS in Plain English:
If you're having difficulty viewing the video (requires Flash), there's a transcript.
Get a feed reader
To view RSS feeds, you need feed reader software. The feed reader will check your chosen feeds and show any new items. There are lots of feed readers to choose from (free too) and fall into two types:
Web-based feed readers
These are accessed through a web browser. Your feeds are stored on the web, which makes them ideal for people want to access their feeds from several different computers or a phone. We recommend Google Reader or Bloglines.
Desktop feed readers
These are readers which you install on your own computer. Feeds are downloaded and stored on your computer, similar to email. Desktop readers typically include more features than web-based readers but at the expense of not being able to view feeds when you're away from your computer.
Some readers for Windows:
…and for Mac users:
Find feeds of interest
When you browse websites, available feeds are typically highlighted by an orange icon. For example, see the list of feeds from the Observatory:
Some web browsers such as Internet Explorer (version 7 onwards), Firefox and Opera make finding feeds much easier. When you visit a page, the browser automatically checks to see if a feed is available. If so, an orange feed button is displayed in the browser address bar:
Subscribe to the feed
Clicking on the orange feed button will subscribe you to the feed. Depending on the feed reader you are using, you may be prompted to choose what reader you wish to use to view the feed. Alternatively, you can copy the feed URL from the website and paste it in your feed reader.
How do I personalise my feeds from this site?
As well as the standard feeds on this site, such as events and publications, you can save your own search query as a feed.
For example, say you want an RSS feed of any new items on this site containing the word 'Walsall'.
- Do a search for the word 'Walsall':
- At the top of the search results, there's a link to subscribe to a feed of the current search results:
- Here's a view of the feed in Google Reader:
