How to use RSS

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What are RSS news feeds?

RSS (“really simple syndication”) is a news feed format used to publish frequently updated content, such as weblog entries, podcasts and news headlines. A news feed is similar to the news ticker you see at the bottom of the TV when watching CNN, with the exception that you can click on a headline when you see an article that interests you.

An individual RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “channel”) is either a summary of the content or the full text. RSS makes it possible for us to send you updates that you can subscribe to by using a news reader called an “aggregator” — or, more simply, a “news reader.” We do this to help you to stay on top of your projects more easily than using a web browser to manually check for new posts.

As far as we’re concerned, RSS could stand for Rather Sophisticated Stuff. If you’re still wondering what “feeds” or “aggregators” or what any of these other terms mean, both Google and the BBC News have good explanations that we recommend reading.

RSS feeds and Desktop alerts

Pages with a feed icon (Feed icon) have a related news feed that can be delivered to your desktop as Desktop alerts. Here are a few pages with their own feeds to help get you started.

Recent changes to posts
Recent changes made anywhere on the site, such as when wiki pages are moved or updated, appear in a single RSS feed at:

http://exaltations.net/recent_changes/feed

Posts in all projects
A single feed displays all the posts (wiki pages, support requests, task, milestones, and so on) in your projects at:

http://exaltations.net/project/posts/feed

Unread posts in all projects
Any posts you haven’t read yet appear in a news feed at:

http://exaltations.net/project/posts/unread/feed

Followup comments on other posts
Comments to posts in your project, such as tasks, milestones and events, appear in a single feed at:

http://exaltations.net/crss

Comments on individual pages
Comments on individual pages, such as this wiki page, are are available in a news feed just for that page. For example, if there were comments on this wiki page, clicking the feed icon at the bottom of this page would display the RSS feed at:

http://exaltations.net/crss/node/1010

Revision history of individual pages
Any page that can have multiple versions (called revisions) such as wiki pages and code snippets have a separate news feed that contains a log of each change. For example, the revision history for this page can be found at:

http://exaltations.net/revisionrss/node/1209

We value your privacy and security

To protect the privacy and security of your projects, a special authentication token unique to your account must be used when using a separate news reader (i.e. anything other than your web browser) to access our news feeds. Your unique token can be found by clicking the RSS authentication token tab in your account preferences.

Your authentication token is as valuable as your account password. If you think that your token has been compromised, please reset your token and contact us immediately.

Here is an example that illustrates how to use your token. If your authentication token is 1234567890 then any news reader can access the “Unread posts” feed by adding ?token=1234567890 to the end of the feed URL:

http://exaltations.net/project/posts/unread/feed?token=1234567890

News readers we recommend

In addition to reading news feeds directly with a web browser, there are many websites that can aggregate RSS news feeds for you into a custom web page with the news you want. There are also standalone applications (for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other platforms) that run on the desktop.

The news readers we know well are the ones that we and our clients use, so please contact us and let us know which news readers you recommend so that we can add them to the list.

Standalone, desktop-based readers

  • Vienna (Mac) is a very attractive news reader. Vienna is to RSS what iTunes is to music.
  • NetNewsWire (Mac) has many, many features and is what we use.
  • NNW Unread Menu (Mac) works with NetNewsWire and displays notifications in the system menu bar.
  • RSS Menu (Mac) unobtrusively notifies you of new articles and opens them in your preferred web browser (instead of using a separate interface).
  • Taskable (Windows) is a news reader built into the Windows taskbar.
  • RSSOwl (multiplatform) is a standalone, open source news reader.

Web-based readers

Terms of use

Exaltation RSS feeds are for your personal use and are not available for commercial use without first obtaining a license from us. Please contact us for more information on using Exaltation RSS feeds.

http://exaltations.net/node/1209