Really Simple Syndication(RSS) is a protocol that allows special monitoring programs called Aggregators to download an XML style stream of data from a website, and make the data available for you to view. Examples of this data are news headlines and message board topics. Since we use the latter around here, it seems like a good thing to make available via RSS.

How is this useful? I check backcountrypilot.org daily to see what discussions are active, which means I have to load the whole website and be pelted with a lot of the color green. If all I am interested in is being informed of when the forum topics change, then I am just going to check my RSS Aggregator, which happens to be built into my web browser of choice(it's free and does not suffer from spyware and adware problems like IE), Mozilla Firefox:



Here are the steps to set this up for Firefox:

1) Double-click the blue RSS icon on the right side of the address bar (where you see the "http://www.backcountrypilot.org/....")
2) Choose "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder" and Click OK.
3) You're done.

Alternately, you can do this to manually add an RSS feed:

1) Given that you have the Firefox browser installed, click on Bookmarks
2) Select Manage Bookmarks
3) Click File > New Live Bookmark (Live means it refreshes its content from the internet)
4) Set Name: Backcountrypilot.org
5) Set Feed Location(copy and paste this url):
6) You can now click the button to show the most recent topics!

Here are the steps to set this up for Internet Explorer:

Coming someday. At this point, IE doesn't support RSS bookmarks

Hey Zane, how difficult was it to add the rss support to the phpbb system. I was thinking about suggesting the same over at the supercub site, but was wary about creating too much work for Steve.

Steve already has it available. Maybe do a search on the subject at sc.org. Somewhere in there he has the url similar to mine for the rss feed.

-z

Thanks. With firefox I've gotten lazy about looking for the RSS symbol in the bottom right of the window.

Hey Zane, how come I don't get the RSS symbol on the status bar when I'm on your site?

When I click the URL above I get this message at the top of the page: This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

Doug,

You should see the RSS symbol now if you are on the homepage. I haven't added it yet for any other pages.

Z

I've installed the RSS feed for forum topics for PHPBB 3.0:

Copy and paste this URL into your feed reader or Firefox live bookmark:

http://www.backcountrypilot.org/forum/rss.php?mode=topics