RSS At Creative Stage Lighting

What is RSS?

The RSS Feed Icon

RSS is an acronym for Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication, but all you really need to know is that RSS is a way to keep tabs on sites without having to constantly visit them.

Websites with RSS capability allow you to subscribe to a feed of the site, and that feed tells you when the site has been updated. At Creative Stage Lighting, we use our RSS feed to indicate when a site feature has been added, a new press release has been issued, a new newsletter has been released, or any appropriate update.

There are a few benefits to using RSS. It's completely opt-in. You choose to subscribe to a feed and you choose when to stop gathering a feed. There are no forms to fill out and no emails to clog your inbox. You can save time by having updates come to you and not the other way around.

Read the Wikipedia entry on RSS for more information.

Also, don't forget to subscribe to CSL's news feed: Creative Stage Lighting News Feed

How Do I Subscribe To A Feed?

This largely depends on the software you use. Let's take a quick overlook at how feeds work directly in some popular web browsers.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer introduced feed support in IE7. When IE7 finds a feed this toolbar icon will light up in the upper right hand area of the browser window:

RSS in IE7

Click on that toolbar icon and an option to subscribe to a feed will appear:

RSS in IE7 - Step 2

Click the name of the feed and IE7 will display the contents of the feed for you and ask if you'd like to subscribe. Upon successfully subscribing the feed will now be viewable in IE7 and is stored by default in the feeds tab of the favorites sidebar.

CSL in the IE7 sidebar

By default, IE7 checks feeds for updates every 15 minutes. New entries in a feed are indicated by bold text. For more information on IE7 and feeds, please take Microsoft's RSS feature tour.

Firefox

Firefox uses feeds to generate live bookmarks, which is like a bookmark folder of links from a feed.

When a feed is found by Firefox it will be indicated in the address bar:

RSS in Firefox

Click the feed icon and a dialogue box asking you to save the bookmark will appear. By default it will be saved in the bookmark toolbar:

Firefox - Live Bookmark dialogue box

You'll now see the feed in your bookmark toolbar. Click on it and all the latest entries will be accessible with a click.

Learn about feeds and other Firefox features.

Safari

Safari behaves a lot like a cross between IE7 and Firefox when it comes to feeds.

When Safari finds a feed, it displays an RSS icon in the address bar:

Safari RSS

Click on that icon and a page displaying the latest feed entries will appear. From here you can save it as a bookmark and when a feed is updated a number is displayed next to the RSS bookmark indicating the number of unread items.

Other Methods

You can also use a software application or website dedicated to reading news feeds. Here are a few examples to get you started: