RSS Help

What's New?

BCA is now offering a new way to stay in touch and up to date. The "What's New?" section on the home page of bca.org now has an RSS feed. By subscribing to the RSS feed you will see when a new news item has been added to the home page. If you’re not familiar with RSS please read on to learn more.

What is RSS and how do I subscribe to an RSS feed?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it's essentially a quick way to get updates about a web page's content. That update will consist of a title, summary, and a hyperlink link about something that has just recently been posted on the website. It may be headline news, sports or financial news, updates on a particular topic you're interested in or even a blog you like to read.

Many news websites such as the BBC News and CNN offer a variety of RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.

The benefit of subscribing to an RSS feed is that you can quickly see if something new has been posted to a website. Once you have subscribed to an RSS feed, it will periodically check to see if there have been any updates to the feed which you've subscribed. A link to the full news story is then provided.

There are many options for subscribing to and reading an RSS feed such as stand-alone applications or plug-ins for email programs. However, all but the most ardent news-hound will probably just want to use their web browser. Most all modern web browsers support RSS feeds.

If your browser supports RSS feeds, when you are on a website that offers a feed, you will usually see a little orange or blue RSS symbol at the end of the URL line. Subscribing is as simple as clicking on the RSS icon. That initiates the subscription process which amounts to nothing more than adding a bookmark. However, once subscribed, the web browser then checks the subscribed RSS feeds regularly for new items.

The RSS symbol and location of that symbol do vary depending on the web browser. While Firefox puts it at the end of the URL line, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 places the orange RSS symbol below the URL in a button menu. Apple's Safari uses a blue RSS rectangle at the end of the URL line. Some browsers may even display an orange XML symbol because RSS feeds are an XML-based format.

Reading RSS Feeds

The user interface to monitor and read the RSS feeds will vary depending on the web browser. In Firefox they show up as Live Bookmarks so when you mouse over a subscribed feed (Live Bookmark), a submenu of bookmarks will appear where you will see just the title for each item within that feed. The newest item will be at the top of the submenu list. Clicking on that Live Bookmark's title will take you to the web page with the full news story.

In Microsoft's IE7, once you have subscribed to a feed you have to view your list of RSS feeds which is essentially a separate list of bookmarks. (Go to View > Explorer Bar > Feeds to make them visible.) Clicking on a subscribed feed will then show you a list of all of the items within that feed as well as summary information. You can also sort by date or by title.

Apple's Safari creates a traditional bookmark for the RSS feed but clicking on it will then show you a list of all of the items within that feed as well as summary information. Like IE, you can also sort by date or by title but Safari also allows you to control how much of the summary you will see for each item.

For more information about RSS, see the entry on Wikipedia.  

Subscribe to the BCA What's New? RSS Feed

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Click on the orange RSS icon to subscribe to the BCA What's New? RSS feed.