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About News Syndication and Subscribing to the St. Peter's Website Feed

The small orange icon found on the home page and elsewhere ( ) provides a way for you to subscribe to news articles and announcements from St. Peter's and have them delivered to you automatically through a "News Reader" (or "Feed Reader").

To make a long story short:  when we publish an announcement on the St. Peter's Home Page, we also publish it to a special file called a "feed."  (Feeds are also known as RSS; we think RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication," but there are other opinions on the matter.)   Feeds are really just web pages that are read by computers rather than people.

News feeds, in other words, allow you to see when the St. Peter's website has added new content, without actually clicking to the St. Peter's site itself.  This becomes handy when you are interested in keeping track of what's going on on numerous different websites; you can get all the news in one place.

So, what do I do?

The first thing you need is a "news reader," which is a piece of software that checks the feeds you choose and lets you read any new articles that have been added.  There are several different kinds of readers, among them:

• Browser-based news readers, which let you access your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer (although you'll have to log in to your own news reader account to do it).  
• Downloadable readers, which will only work on your own machine.

Most web news services and many other sites syndicate their news and other content; when you see the orange icon, you'll know they do it, and you can just click it to subscribe to any news feed.  Your reader will open and instruct you in the process.

Some browsers - Firefox, Opera and Safari among them - automatically check for feeds when you visit a website; this can make subscribing to feeds much easier.  See details on the browser website.

How do I find a news reader?

That's a good question.  There are many news readers available:  Bloglines, Google Reader. Yahoo, and NewsGator all offer them, to name just a few.  A really simple and excellent way to figure out which is best is to ask some  friends!  That way, you can see what software others have had success with before making up your mind - and then you'll have somebody to ask questions of as well.

If you're the adventurous type, you can also search the web for "News Readers" or "Feed Readers," and find all sorts of information.

You can subscribe now, if you've already got a feed reader, by clicking the icon: .

Podcasts

Episcopal Life Online, and other news and information sources, often offer podcasts.  From the ELO website, a definition:

A podcast is an audio file, most commonly in MP3 format, made available online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user's convenience.

Podcast software is required to select the programs you would like to download. The software can check the internet regularly and start a download whenever it finds something new. Free podcast software is available from iTunes, iPodder, jPodder, among others. Further information about podcasting for iTunes can be found online at: http://www.apple.com/podcasting.