DGFUMC RSS News Feeds

RSS news feeds provide a way of keeping track of the rapidly-changing content available on the internet. At First United, we are using this relatively new web technology in two ways:

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

The news feed is now maintained by the church office and will be updated as soon as the information is available. The simplest way of reading the feed is to visit the Daily Update page (see link on the left). Add this page to your favorites and check it regularly to keep abreast of the latest news as it breaks. However, if you want to be more adventurous, use one of the special RSS News Readers listed on the right. This page briefly explains how they work.

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.

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 meant to be read directly in a web browser. Instead, they are read by programs called News Readers, or sometimes RSS Aggregators, that regularly monitor web sites and display new headlines as they appear. You can see a list of some of the more popular programs on the right. 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?

In the navigation bar on the left-hand side of nearly all the DGFUMC web pages, the symbol provides a link to the DGFUMC RSS news feed. To subscribe to this news feed, you need to copy this link to the News Reader program :

1. Either right-click (Windows) or control-click (Mac OS X) on the symbol and copy the link address or URL.
2. Open your preferred News Reader or RSS web site, and select the "Subscribe" menu item.
3. Paste the URL when it requests the address of the RSS feed.

If you have trouble copying the RSS feed address, just copy and paste the following URL:

http://www.dgfumc.org/rss.xml

Note: Do not use this address directly in a web browser.

If you don't want to install a special News Reader program, there are a few web sites, such as Bloglines, that keep track of your subscriptions for you. You set up your own subscription page, from which you can read the news feeds in your regular web browser.

Some browsers, such as Firefox and Safari, automatically identify sites that contain RSS feeds and provide ways to browse them.

• If Firefox detects a news feed, it displays the symbol in its address field. If you click on it, you can add the feed to your toolbar so that each of the "headlines" becomes a separate bookmark.
• If Safari detects a news feed, it displays a special RSS logo in its address field. If you click on it, the "headlines" are displayed as a list in a specially formatted page.
• At the moment, Internet Explorer does not display news feeds automatically, but version 7 will contain extra RSS functionality when it is released.