RSS Feeds

What are RSS Feeds?

“RSS feeds” (RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication) allow you to get the newest news or content from a website as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.

TravelOregon.com offers several RSS feeds for use in news readers and personal pages such as your “My Yahoo!”, “iGoogle”, “Myspace” or your personal blog. These feeds include headlines from our blog, summaries of upcoming events and links back to TravelOregon.com for the full article. These feeds are free and are updated as frequently as the corresponding content on our site.

How do I start using feeds?

To start, the first thing you need is something called a “news reader”. This is a piece of software that checks the feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications.

Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you either download your email using Outlook, or keep it on a web-based service like Hotmail.

Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want it to receive. For example, if you would like the latest events from the Oregon Coast region, simply visit the Coast event calendar and you will notice a reddish button on the bottom of the page.

If you click on the RSS button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the feed into your news reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader. Most sites that offer feeds use a similar orange button, but some may just have a normal web link.

Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This can make subscribing to feeds much easier. For more details on these, please check their websites.