TodayinAustin

Visitors to this site:

TodayinAustin is a community bulletin board for RSS that is created by the city's bricks-and-mortar businesses and art organizations.

We organize Austin events by topic and then make them available to you as feeds, which allows you to 'subscribe' to them without having to visit this web site to see what's new.

You can enjoy these feeds in several different ways: 1) As a gadget or widget on your personal home page from iGoogle, MyYahoo, MyAol, and many more. 2) On the Dashboard of your Apple computer using WidgetWizard. 3) Through an RSS feed reader (see links below to get your Reader.)

What is RSS? What's a feed?

Start by thinking about email. It is a message from one person to one person, and it is delivered to a program created to read email.

Feeds are a hybrid between web pages and email. On a web page, they look like normal content. But they can be delivered - like email.

So - RSS feeds are a way to receive messages from web sites.

These messages are very flexible in their formats. You can receive them as an email, OR in an RSS Reader (like your email reader), OR they can be viewed on hundreds of other web sites. That's where the "syndication" comes in: One message is posted, but it can be republished instantly on numerous other web sites, widgets, gadgets, and, of course, to your regular old email in-box.

"RSS" stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds contain headlines and hyperlinks to the Web page with additional information. If you are reading RSS and the headline interests you, just click the link from your reader and you will be on the web site that originally published that information. It's a very time efficient way to keep up with what's new.

If you are a creator of RSS, you can use it to drive more traffic back to your web site.

Big idea: You read feeds with a Reader

RSS readers eliminate the need to browse multiple websites by delivering your favorite web content in a single location of your choosing.

How can you receive RSS feeds? Choose from either desktop applications or web-based applications.

A number of desktop readers are available for you to download, usually at no cost. Other versions are Web and browser-based. Readers vary slightly in how they look and act, so you may find yourself testing several before settling on one.

Web-Based Feed Readers

• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• FeedBucket
• NewsBurst
• Pluck
• Rojo
• YodPod

Desktop Feed Readers

• Mozilla Sage Reader
• BlogBridge
• Feedreader
• FeedDemon
• FeedExplorer