RSS Feeds

RSS news feeds provide a way of keeping track of the rapidly-changing content available on the internet. At First United, RSS feeds are useful for two purposes:

• As a way of identifying newly added web content concerning the programs and events in the church life.
• As a way of alerting the congregation to late-breaking news, such as weather cancellations or urgent appeals for help.

DGFUMC RSS Feeds

At First United, we have a number of RSS feeds that are automatically updated whenever different types of content are added.

Front Page Feed
Recent News Feed
Youth News Feed
Upcoming Events Feed
Recent Blogs Feed

Some pages also show the RSS icons at the bottom, providing other feeds not listed above. These will allow you to track content added specifically to those pages alone.

What is RSS?

RSS stands either for "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary". It is the name of a new method of keeping track of changing content on the internet, which is rapidly gaining in popularity. It is used both by major news sites, such as the New York Times, CNN, and BBC News, and smaller sites whose pages change much less frequently, such as blogs.

Web sites with RSS feeds, such as ours, contain small files that store a list of headlines that link to web pages that have been recently added or updated. It is a way of directing readers only to those parts of the web site that contain new content.

These files are not standard web pages although most modern browsers are able to display their contents. Typically, they are read by programs called News Readers, or sometimes RSS Aggregators, that regularly monitor web sites and display new headlines as they appear. News Reader programs contain a menu item that allows you to "subscribe" to a web site, by adding a link to the site's news feed.

How do I subscribe?

There are three main ways of subscribing to news feeds:

1. Most browsers have RSS readers built into them. To subscribe to a news feed, you would click on one of the above links and then follow the browser's instructions to subscribe to the feed.
2. There are a few web sites, such as Google Reader and Bloglines, that keep track of RSS subscriptions for you. You set up your own subscription page, from which you can read the news feeds in your regular web browser. In that case, right-click on one of the above links and copy the link address or URL so that you can paste it into the RSS feed address field on your subscription page.
3. There are many free and commercial applications that you can download in order to subscribe to multiple RSS feeds, most of which allow you to read the articles without leaving the application. You can find a convenient list of them for different operating systems here.