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Our RSS Feed Click here for our SouthHighSucks.com RSS Feed

Are you sick and tired of logging onto several different news sites every day to get your daily dose of information? Well, now there's a way to keep track of headlines from a bunch of different sites at once, without having to remember URLs or spend a lot of time surfing from site to site. It's called "RSS"--or Really Simple Syndication. It enables web surfers to look at a compilation of headlines and story summaries from several different sites at once. Here's how it works: website owners post special files on their site known as RSS feeds, which can then be accessed by visitors using an RSS Reader.

How to Use RSS

In order to use RSS, you first must download and install an RSS Reader on your computer. There are many different RSS Readers available, and many are available free of charge. Check your favorite search engine or shareware site, such as Download.com or TuCows.com.

Once you have an RSS Reader, then you need to find RSS Feeds for it. You can find RSS Feeds at many websites, including the websites of most daily newspapers, television networks and local TV stations, blogs, and more--including SouthHighSucks.com, where we maintain an RSS feed of our five most recent news stories. You'll generally find the links to RSS Feeds labeled either XML or RSS feeds, and sometimes sites will link to their feed with a small button like the one below.

Our RSS Feed Click here for our SouthHighSucks.com RSS Feed

When you find the RSS feed, your browser will show what might look like a bunch of gibberish to those of you who do not spend a lot of time building websites "from scratch". In any event, all you need to do is copy the web address of the page of gibberish from the address bar of your browser into the add a feed box in your RSS Reader and you're done. Repeat this process until you have loaded as many RSS Feeds as you want into your RSS Reader. Now all you need to do is open up your RSS Reader program and it automatically loads in headlines, article summaries, and links to the full article for all of your RSS Feeds. Then you can get all your news at once, pick which stories you want to read, and be on your way.

Adding SouthHighSucks.com Headlines to Your Site

RSS feeds have other applications as well. With a simple script, RSS feeds allow website operators to put headlines from other websites on their site. Why would somebody want to do that? Because the more features you have on your website, the more likely you are get visitors to keep coming back. And headlines on your site can make your site more useful--especially if you can find an RSS feed that has information on the topics that you cover in your site. All you have to do to put headlines on your site is find an RSS Feed you'd like to feature on your site, and then visit Maricopa College's RSS-to-Web Page. At Maricopa's site, all you need to do is enter the URL of the RSS feed, and answer a few questions about how you want the RSS feeds to be formatted, and they will give you an small piece of javascript, which you simply cut and paste into your website's HTML code--and then you've got headlines on your site. We use this service to provide our visitors with headlines from the Pioneer Press, Star Tribune, and other sources--and it's the service we use to offer you the ability to put our headlines on your site.

Code for SouthHighSucks.com Headlines on Your Site

Here's the code you'll need to put SouthHighSucks.com Headlines on your website.
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.southhighsucks.com%2Fheadlines.xml&desc=50&targ=y" type="text/javascript"></script>
<noscript>
<a href="http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.southhighsucks.com%2Fheadlines.xml&desc=50&targ=y&html=y">View RSS feed</a>
</noscript>

Formatting Tips for RSS on your Site

The Maricopa site offers a great service, and we encourage you to use it to put ours and other people's headlines on your site. However, if you choose to use this service, we'd like to share some helpful tips with you that will make your headlines work better. If you're familiar with CSS, you can use it to format the text and links used for the headlines on your site. Here's how. Place the following code at the top of your page right under the <title> tag.
<LINK href="css.css" type=text/css rel=stylesheet media="all">

Then, open up a blank file in your favorite text editor, such as Microsoft Notepad, and paste in the following:

Then, change any of the items on either of the lines to reflect your desired formatting. The line that begins li determines how all of the headlines will appear (because in HTML, li is code for an item in a bulleted list, and the headlines from Maricopa will appear in a bulleted list). The line that begins with a determines how the hyperlinks will look. Once you're done changing the information in those two lines, save the file as a text-only file named "css.css". Then upload it to the same folder on your server that houses the HTML page you just edited, and you're done.

Conclusion

Our RSS Feed Click here for our SouthHighSucks.com RSS Feed

Bottom line, we feel RSS is a great service that you'll enjoy using (or at the very least, it will help increase your productivity). Anyway, we're proud to offer RSS Feeds (and this RSS information page) to our visitors, and we'd be happy to answer any questions or concerns you might have--just contact us through the Comment Form in the right margin of this page--(you'll probably have to scroll up to the top of the page, though). We appreciate your feedback, and will respond to any inquiry.--Dr. Vinny, Founder & Publisher

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