RSS or News Feeds
What are RSS or News Feeds?
News Feeds (often called RSS feeds) allow you to see when websites have added new content without having to visit the website each time.
Generally, users set up a "News reader" (sometimes called News Aggregator, Feed reader, RSS reader) that can pull in feeds from multiple sources all in the one spot so users can see updates to their favourite websites without having to go to visit each of those websites individually.
A publicly available video, called "RSS in Plain English", has been put together by Common Craft. It is very helpful in explaining how RSS feeds work.
topI don't really see the benefit...can you give an example?
Susie owns a café and employs five staff. She knows she is obliged to keep up to date with current rates of pay under the Restaurants & Employees (State) Award. Susie has set her "News reader" to subscribe to the Pay Rate Updates news feed, so that her news reader will tell her every time the award has changed.
Mike is an industrial officer with the Community Pharmacy Employers' Association. He is responsible for ensuring that the Community Pharmacy (State) Award is kept up to date by filing variations in the NSW Industrial Relations Commission. Rather than reading the NSW Industrial Gazette each week to see if his variations have been published, Mike subscribes to the news feed for his award. His News Reader shows him if any new variations to his award have become available.
Why would I use News Feeds instead of email updates?
News Feeds are not affected by spam and virus emails, a problem that is affecting many home and business computer users. Your reader automatically checks to see if your specified websites have changed, and shows you new stories which you can decide to read or ignore.
What do I look for on a web site to find RSS or News Feeds?
Sounds useful...how can I get started?
To start you'll need some sort of "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. You can access or download a news reader from:
There are plenty of other readers as well.
All you have to do once you have chosen a reader is to add feeds to it. The NSW Office of Industrial Relations provides feeds to 113 different awards. You'll be able to identify RSS feeds on our site by the icon 
.
Clicking on the icon will take you to the feed page. To subscribe to the feed simply copy the link from the icon and paste or add it to your reader. (Some readers, such as Yahoo, will let you drag and drop the icon straight into your reader).
What else can I use News Feeds for?
News Feeds can help you keep up to date in many areas. Newspapers and many other information sources on the internet now use this method to keep you up to date. See our web page on RSS Feeds for Small Business for some other ideas.