RSS feeds
New materials
- NEW 000-299 Computing, Phil, Psych, Religions
- NEW 300-329 Social Sciences, Politics
- NEW 330-339 Economics
- NEW 340-369 Law, Social Work, Criminology
- NEW 370-399 Education, Commerce
- NEW 400-599 Languages, Natural Sciences
- NEW 600-649 Medicine, Engineering, Agriculture
- NEW 650-699 Accounting, Management
- NEW 700-799 Art, Architecture, Music, Cinema
- NEW 800-899 Literature
- NEW 900-999 Geography, Travel, History
- LAW NEW Books
What is RSS?
To most people, RSS is simply a way of getting the content of a website without the other stuff. RSS is particularly useful for 'news' based websites, or any site with constantly changing information that users want to keep up with.
To get the most out of RSS, you need a method of reading it. There are many free stand-alone applications for all types of computer. Good starting points are NetNewsWire Lite for Mac OSX or Sharpreader for Windows. There are also excellent readers such as Sage that work cross-platform within Firefox and Mozilla, with the big advantage that you can add a feed automatically from a page as you are browsing. There are an increasing number of online readers, which are great if you want to be able to access your favourite news feeds from any computer. Try Google Reader, or Rojo.
You can find RSS feeds at many websites. Most blogs have them automatically, but you can also find them at major news sites like the ABC. The easiest way to tell if a site has RSS feeds is to look for the icon, usually orange. There are a few variations, but these are the most commonly used icons: 
. Safari on OSX displays a blue icon 
. A page may contain many feeds, you just need to locate the link to the one you want.
If you want to know more about RSS and how you can use it, there are already many well written tutorials and introductions available on the web. These ones from the BBC and feedburner.com are good examples. There is also a detailed description at wikipedia.