As you browse Aspects you will notice “Subscribe to Aspects” links on most pages, alongside a small orange logo. You’ll probably have seen similar links on many other websites. These links all point to RSS feeds.
RSS is a technology that helps you keep track of your favorite websites. Before RSS, the only way to keep track of updates to a website was for you to manually return to a site on a regular basis to see if anything new had been added.
RSS turns this around. You can subscribe to an RSS news feed on your favourite website and be automatically notified when new content is added.
There are several RSS news feeds on the Aston website including the one on the new Aspects site.You can subscribe to the Aspects feed and be automatically notified when a new story is added to the site.
How to subscribe to a feed
To subscribe to an RSS feed you need a RSS reader. This is a tool which checks the websites you have subscribed to and lets you know when something new has been added.
RSS Readers work a little bit like email. You’ll see a list of the websites you have subscribed to and those with new content will be marked in bold. You can click on an item to read the latest additions to the site right there in the feed reader, or click through to visit the site itself.
There are many different RSS readers available.
Internet Explorer 7 and 8 have an inbuilt RSS reader. Click on the RSS link, then click on “Subscribe to this feed”. Your feeds will be stored in the IE Favourites Centre, which you can see by clicking the yellow star on the IE toolbar.
Firefox also has an inbuilt RSS Reader, called Live Bookmarks. Click on the RSS link, then click “Subscribe now”.
Google Reader is a free, web-based RSS Reader. You will need a Google (or Gmail) account to use it, but this is quick and easy to set up.
Bloglines is another free, web-based Reader.
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