Ardenwood Elementary School Website and RSS Feeds What are RSS Feeds RSS (most commonly translated as "Really Simple Syndication" but sometimes "Rich Site Summary") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a standardized format. For more information visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rss Advantages RSS gives benefits to both readers (users) and web publishers. It gives you the latest updates. Whether it is about the weather, new music, software upgrade, local news, or a new posting from a rarely- updates site learn about the latest as soon as it comes out. It gives the power of subscription to the user. Users are given a free- hand on which websites to subscribe in their RSS aggregators which they can change at any time they decide differently. It saves on surfing time. Since an RSS feed provides a summary of the related article, it saves the user s time by helping s/he decide on which items to prioritize when reading or browsing the net. It is spam free. Unlike email subscriptions, RSS does not make use of your email address to send updates thus your privacy is kept safe from spam mails. Unsubscribing is hassle- free. Unlike email subscription that has complex steps, all you have to do is to delete the RSS feed from your aggregator. Where can I use RSS Feeds RSS Feeds can be viewed on your personal Google Home Page, Yahoo Home Page and there are several RSS Readers that you can use to aggregate multiple feeds. The simplest of all, is to use the igoogle personal home page and below, there is information on how to set it up. Ardenwood School Website http://www.ardenwoodschool.org is the official website address for Ardenwood Elementary School. The website currently has RSS Feeds for most of the important pages. This includes Calendar, Announcements, All the news pages, Newsletters, FAQ etc. 1
Getting News feeds to your email Ardenwood school website News can be obtained to your email inbox as and when it gets updated. There are multiple companies that provide RSS feed to Email service. Below instructions demonstrate the use of feedmyinbox.com Go to News - > School News (This could be any News section) Click on the RSS feed icon and copy the RSS Feed URL Go to feedmyinbox.com website and enter this URL, your email address and Frequency at which you want to receive the feed. 2
Click on Feed My Inbox button. You are all set to receives news to your email. The above can be repeated on an page where you see an RSS icon Introducing igoogle igoogle is a customizable home page for your Google account. If you have a Gmail account, you already have igoogle. To log into igoogle, Go to google.com. Click on Sign in. Enter your gmail, username and password. Click Sign In 3
If you are not taken to igoogle at this point, then click on igoogle at the top right corner of the page. It will toggle between igoogle and Classic Home. You will be presented with some standard gadgets. You can add and remove more gadgets of your choice, customize them etc. For more information on how to use gadgets, visit the help page for igoogle at http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/topic.py?topic=1592 Adding Ardenwood RSS Feed as a Gadget For illustration purpose, we ll add the Ardenwood school news into the igoogle page. Go to Ardenwood School website at http://www.ardenwodschool.org 4
Go to School News Page by navigating News - > School News on the top menu. Click on School News link. This page shows all the news as it gets published. Click on the RSS Feed icon. 5
You will be taken to a page where you can choose your RSS display method. Google, Yahoo and other readers. For this purpose choose Add to Google. You will be taken to the Google Page. Click on Add to Google Homepage button 6
You will be taken to your igoogle Home page where you will see the latest 3 news items. Click on any of the news item and you will be taken to the corresponding news page on the Ardenwood School website. 7
Customizing the Gadget To customize the gadget to show more than 3 news items, click on the pull down menu at the top of the gadget and choose Edit settings Change the value from 3 to another number and click save. You are all set! For additional help For additional help, send an email to webadmin@ardenwoodschool.org 8