Subscribing to RSS Feeds

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RSS is internet service that subscribes to a website. Our homepage and a page in the Links section incorporate RSS feeds to automatically creating relevant content for our website.

RSS is old technology and largely out of favor these days, but the content feed is still available on many websites, including ours. It is of great use for websites that you want to follow that update infrequently. On my Apple laptop, I use a free program called “RSSBot” to subscribe to a few websites. There are programs for Windows PC’s that do similar functions, as well. A very widely used RSS program is Feedly, which offers a basic version for free plus more sophisticated versions with paid subscriptions.

RSS technology is useful for a site such as our https://etchellsfleet27.com because you don’t have to logon to the site to see if anything is new. You will get a notification when a news item is added. For our Etchells site, subscribe with the URL: https://etchellsfleet27.com/?feed=rss2 for the news entries. For all the comments, use URL: https://etchellsfleet27.com/index.php/comments/feed/.

To find the RSS link on any website you want to subscribe to, open the target website on your browser (say Firefox) and then show the page source (in Firefox, use Tools>Web Developer>Inspector). You will open up a ton of html code in a window. Use the search function to find “RSS” in the code. It may appear several times, or none at all. If the website supports RSS feeds, cycle through the found items to find the lines that contain RSS+XML plus the word feed. This line will have the URL to enter in your RSS tracking program. The URL is in quotes and is often in blue text.

It sounds complicated, but it will help save you time.

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