RSS Feeds

Sunday School

RSS feed for recent and up coming Bible verses and topics covered in the Sr. High Sunday school class

Events

RSS feed for recent and up coming events that the OUMC Youth will be participating in.

News

RSS feed for recent and up coming news about OUMC Youth.
 

Whats an RSS Feed?

If you spend much time online you’ve probably noticed that, after a while, it gets hard to keep up with all the things that interest you. Each time you find a site you like, that’s another site you have to bookmark and check on regularly; eventually you just don’t have time to keep track of them all. So wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way for those sites to let you know when they had something new?

As it turns out, there is: all the site has to do is provide a special file called a feed, which lists all the latest items posted to the site. Sometimes they’ll go by strange names like “syndication feed”, “RSS feed”, “Atom feed” or “XML feed”, but as long as you see the word “feed” it’ll be OK. A lot of sites now are also switching to using a standard icon to show that they offer a feed; sometimes you’ll see it in a page, and sometimes you’ll see it next to the site’s address in your browser. It will look something like this (expect some variations in color and size):

When a site offers a feed, you can have a program called a feed reader automatically check on it several times a day and let you know when there’s an update. You can tell a feed reader program to watch as many sites as you like (this is called subscribing and, despite the name, it doesn’t cost you any money), so this can be a huge convenience.

There are lots of good feed readers out there, and many of them are free. Some run on your own computer, while others run through a website, so you don’t even have to download anything to use them. Like feeds, feed readers sometimes go by lots of names — you may see them called “aggregators”, “news readers”, “feed aggregators”, “news aggregators” or some other big word — but they all work the same way: you just tell the feed reader what sites you want to subscribe to, and it does the rest. If that sounds good, check out this list of feed readers and find one you like.