Bulletin Board Syndicated

The NYCGHA Bulletin Board is syndicated as an RSS newsfeed.

What is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to pull information from all over the Internet and do almost anything with it. The image associated with RSS is an orange button labelled, unhelpfully, "XML" (because RSS uses eXtensible Markup Language).

What can I do with RSS?
You could use RSS to create a custom newspaper, but one that includes only stories that interest you and you have not seen before. Here is the TiVo page from the webmaster's collection of RSS newsfeeds. His RSS collection resides in a sidebar on the side of his screen, scrolling from page to page as news arrives. The TiVo page scrolled up because someone published alerts about scheduling conflicts for Monk, Cold Case, Lost, and Battlestar Gallatica. He did not have to visit any websites to find out if there were new alerts; instead the alerts appeared because they are new.

Other items in the webmaster's RSS collection are the St. Louis Blues, Wall Street, Mozilla Firefox, various political blogs, and, of course, the NYCGHA Bulletin Board. Whenever there's something new in those areas, the headlines scroll onto his screen. He does not go hunting to find out if there is something new. News that interests him comes to him.

You can also use RSS to republish web content. For example, the NYCGHA homepage includes NHL Headlines courtesy of Yahoo. The headlines update continuously and automatically as Yahoo publishes them.

How do I start using RSS newsfeeds?
Use a program known as a News Reader to display, collect or update RSS newsfeeds. Here are a few News Readers:

• my.yahoo.com has a free News Reader built in. Visit my.yahoo.com/s/about/rss/ for directions. It is the easiest way to get started.
• Desktop Sidebar is also free and includes a News Reader. It is the webmaster's personal choice.
• Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Opera browser all have RSS newsreaders built in.
• Radio Userland - Standalone program for Windows or Mac.
• NewsCrawler - Standalone program for Windows.
• There are many others. Some use Java; others plug-in to Outlook. Some are free; some are not.

How do I subscribe to the Bulletin Board's newsfeed?
After installing a News Reader, click on the green 'Subscribe' button. It will take you to a page where you can add our newsfeed to any of the most popular News Readers with one more click.

If you like to do things manually, use the orange XML button, according to the instructions for your News Reader.