Center for Bottomland Hardwoods Research

Subscribe to our RSS Feed

What's a RSS feed and why would I want one?

A RSS feed is a file, in XML format, that contains information about which pages on a website are new or updated. An aggregator, also called a feed reader or a news aggregator, is a program that interprets a feed and makes it more readable, typically displaying a list of new or updated pages, a short description of each, and a link directly to the page. Aggregators can "subscribe" to -- in essence, monitor -- feeds from multiple sites.

You pick the sites you're interested in tracking, and the aggregator tells you when something's new on those sites -- all without you having to visit the sites!

Feeds can also be "consumed" on websites. This means that the web site is syndicating content from another site. For example, the Forest Service News link on our site syndicates content from a RSS feed generated in Washington. If you enjoy our content, you may wish to ask your webmaster to consume our feed on your local website.

What do I need to do?

To use our site, you'll need an aggregator that supports RSS 2.0. Aggregators come in a wide variety of flavors. Some are web services, available from any browser, while others must be installed on your computer and are specific to your operating system. Some support only specific versions of RSS, some support them all. Some are free, some are not. One fairly comprehensive list of available readers can be found at this url: http://www.ourpla.net/cgi-bin/pikie.cgi?RssReaders

Second, you need to "subscribe" to one or more of our feeds, which essentially means to tell the aggregator to monitor our feed. Different aggregators will do this in different ways. Some may ask you to type a url for the feed (Hint: Point to one of the rss feeds in our Feeds Library and most browsers will show you the url in the browser status bar), while others may ask for the url to the site (http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/cbhr/) and will locate the feed for you. A few may even allow you to navigate to our site and simply click the link for the feeds.

That's it! You're ready to go!