what is rss?

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way to receive headlines and other web content to your desktop. Instead of having to go back to a website to see what's new, you can have new information delivered to you.

RSS provides summaries of news articles and links to the full documents. This can be a link to a new feature, an update, or the notification of an event. When a news item arrives, you will receive a headline and brief summary. The headline will be a hyperlink to the full information.

If you close your news reader, you will not be advised of updates until the next time you open it. The RSS feeds allow you to receive updates from the CTC Blog: Technical Communications on your computer desktop.

How do I use RSS?

First of all, you will have to have a news reader. You can download a news reader, or use the RSS feed feature in the Firefox browser. There are many online readers available through Google, Yahoo etc. The new Internet Explorer (IE7) will also support the RSS feed feature. This icon is the standardized image that represents a RSS feed. A news reader we recommend for its simplicity is SharpReader.

If you will be using SharpReader as your news reader you may have to use the following steps:

Download SharpReader, and install. If the install of Sharpreader halts, it means you will have to install the .NET Framework 1.1 and you will be redirected to this download site.
After the .NET Framework 1.1 is installed, download .NET Framework 1.1 SP 1, and install
Return to SharpReader, and install

Once you have a news reader installed follow the link by clicking on the image link, select and copy the URL of the resulting page in the address bar (it looks like this - http://www.pixeldrum.com/CTC_blog/atom.xml). Open your news reader and create a new subscription by inserting (pasting) the copied address in the news reader's address bar, select subscribe and your news reader will now be updated regularly with new posts from the Technical Communications weblog.