Hintlink - RSS Newsfeed

RSS News Feeds

Getting Started - some introductory reading

RSS explained for “the common man” (BBC link)
All you ever wanted to know about RSS (Harvard)

The Client side – for the end user:

Programs	Comments	Other
Abilon	Standalone. Does authenticated feeds.	Requires no other code installs. Too old for NOAA feeds*
Snarfer	Standalone. Does authenticated feeds. Update rate limiting.	Requires no other code installs.
Feedreader	Standalone. Does authenticated feeds. Layout limiting.	Requires no other code installs.
Greatnews	Standalone. Does authenticated feeds. Layout fixed at last!	Requires no other code installs. RECOMMENDED. ***
Blognavigator	Standalone. Doesn't do authenticated feeds.	Requires no other code installs.
Awasu	Free version doesn't do authenticated feeds.	Requires no other code installs.
RssReader		Requires .NET.

Whichever you choose, download it to an area such as C:\downloads\news\rss on your local hard drive. Then open Windows Explorer and run it and install it by double clicking the program. Most readers come with some pre-installed news feeds, but you may want to find others at such sites as http://backend.userland.com/2003/06/24 and http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss Once you have a reader running select New and paste into the URL box the RSS page of your choice (e.g. you can copy and paste the Hintlink address http://hintlink.com/hintlink_rss.xml ) into this box. As new news arrives from each source, you’ll get a little pop-up box in the bottom right hand side of your screen. In Firefox, the browser will ask you if you want to use it as a Live Bookmark. Don't choose this. Copy and paste the address into your RSS feedreader (most Readers will even auto-paste this into a "New Feed" option).

NOTE: Hintlink has about a dozen RSS feeds. The above one is our company announcement page. Others are in our Calendar page area.

FOR WEBMASTERS and news providers - making your RSS Newsfeed to feed to your users:

Recommended: ListGarden . Runs as an exe file, which then opens in your browser. Fast, efficient, works, free. Limited in output options, though (no image file, for example).

Also: RSSBuilder. Appears to work well.

The RSS authoring Extension for Firefox is, so far, awful; crashes and fails all of our compatibility tests.

For our own feeds, we use a custom auto-generation method (written in-house) which comes from an Access database.

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