National & International

Top Stories
NPR Topics: World
NPR Topics: Nation
Art & Culture
NPR Topics: Business

Metro & State

Faith & Fitness
Magic City Marketplace
Legislative Review and Preview
Charter Schools: The Texas Example
OTL: Charter Schools
John Archibald
Charter Schools: Politics
Charter Schools: Do They Work?
Charter Schools 101
Open Secret
Southern Environmentalism
Electronic Bingo Showdown
Dr. Freida Hill
Girlyman
Childhood Obesity Grant
The Race for Mayor: The Runoff
Restoring Wetlands on Farmlands
Shelter and Cold
Greening the Greens
Magic City Marketplace
Timber Theft
Considering Faith: Religion 101
John Archibald
Estrogen Contamination in Waterways
Mayoral Forum
The Race for Mayor
Mercedes Moves C-Class
Birmingham's Airport To Expand
Davis on Constitutional Reform
News Features Archive

What is RSS?

An RSS file is basically a list of headlines encoded so that it can be easily used by another program or website. RSS is usually said to stand for "Really Simple Syndication" and it is relatively easy to implement and use. RSS is a form of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which means that each piece of data in the list — a headline, a description of a story — is coded separately so that a program will know exactly what to do with it

Programs that know what to do with RSS files are called "news aggregators." They let you read headlines from dozens or hundreds of news sites at one time. You simply plug in the addresses of the RSS files you want, such as "http://wbhm.org/News/Feed.rdf".

News aggregators have been proliferating lately. Some popular ones are Amphetadesk (for Windows, Linux, or Mac), Radio (for Windows or Mac), NetNewsWire (for Mac), KlipFolio, NewzCrawler (for Windows), and FeedReader (a bare-bones Estonian PC version). Four aggregators that require a bit more technical knowledge are Syndirella, Aggie, NewsGator, and SharpReader (all require Microsoft's .NET to be installed on your PC). A Java installation is required for nntp//rss, a program which lets you read RSS files in Outlook Express or any other newsgroup-reading software. Or if you'd like your RSS headlines in a news ticker, try wTicker (for Windows).

Once you have one of these aggregators installed, you'll need to know the location of WBHM's News Feed (http://wbhm.org/News/Feed.rdf).