The orange button indicates an RSS feed
For the convenience of readers who don't want to waste time going on line and accessing the school website in order to check whether the site as a whole has been updated or whether The Rector and The Headteacher have updated their blogs, the school website has now installed three RSS feeds. Once you subscribe to a feed the website will tell you when a page is updated. Additionally when the latest update is short the feed will automatically download it to your desktop without your having to log on to the school website at all.
What is RSS?
RSS is a syndication standard that websites use to syndicate their content. The original acronym stood for 'Rich Site Summary'. However, that meaning has now been replaced by the major benefit of RSS which is 'Really Simple Syndication'. Most people today refer to RSS by this meaning. RSS Feeds were first used mainly by news organizations to syndicate their content. Nowadays, RSS is usually associated with blogs or blogging and to notify regular users of websites whenever there are important changes.
Usually, an RSS Feed will consist of headlines and snippets of information with links linking back to a blog or website. Some RSS Feeds contain the full body of content. Once you are subscribed to an RSS Feed, you will be automatically updated as new information comes online. It's a very practical and convenient way to stay informed on all your different areas of interest.
How Do I Use RSS?
You will find that many websites today display small orange buttons inviting you to subscribe and receive notification of updates in this way, so if you regularly visit other sites you may find this a very labour saving system. Right click on the orange button, highlight "copy shortcut" and then simply add it to the list of feeds monitored by your RSS reader.
In order to subscribe to the feeds you need to download and install on your machine an RSS reader (or aggregator) that is compatible with your operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac etc). These are available free of charge. The one from rssreader.com seems to work well with Windows XP.
Another popular way to access and read RSS Feeds is through sites like MyYahoo or MyMSN. Just press the MyYahoo button and you will be automatically subscribed to that site. Some browsers, such as the increasingly popular Mozilla Firefox, now come with an RSS feature or function. It has a 'live bookmark' feature that will keep you up to date on all your bookmarked sites.
Keeping up to date
If you already have such a reader then just add to the feeds that you receive the URL's of our RSS feeds. These are:
http://www.edinburghacademy.org.uk/rssfeed.xml for the site as a whole
http://www.edinburghacademy.org.uk/news/feed.xml for the Rector's blog and http://www.edinburghacademy.org.uk/news/feedjunior.xml for the Headteacher's blog.
This page is: Edinburgh Academy / whatisrss.htm /
