HRR News, Results & Events RSS Feed
The purpose of this page to explain what the RSS feed is, why it is useful, and how to use it.
Note: the RSS feed is an additional notification mechanism - it does not replace any existing scripting which automatically updates the front page of the site upon new content being posted.
What are RSS feeds?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds provide a convenient mechanism for notifying people of fresh content to web sites.
Why subscribe to RSS feeds?
For people that like to monitor information on several sites, but do not necessarily want to manually check each for new content, they are excellent. A significant number of online news providers now provide an XML feed, enabling continuous stream of headlines when articles are posted. (For example, the BBC offer a wide variety of RSS feeds.)
What software do I need to subscribe?
The HRR feed is RSS v2.0 compliant - I am not aware of a feed reader which does not support this format (if this is not sufficient let me know).
Standalone software
Several standalone applications are freely available for various operating systems. These are designed to run silently in the background, notifying you (by pop-up typically) when new content is posted to one of the sites you are interested in. Doing a web search for free RSS reader software will reveal lots of hits, though be careful of readers that also display popup ads.
The BBC provide a useful page containing lots of RSS-related information, including links to a few feed readers for various operating systems.
Integrated feed readers
Rather than installing and running a separate application you can also choose to install a plugin to existing software you may have. Several web browsers and email clients support RSS feeds. For example:
- Sage, a plugin for Firefox browsers
- Thunderbird, an email client with built in RSS support
Web-based feed readers
Finally, you may prefer to use an entirely web-based feed reading service. This may be offered by your ISP, or you could use one of the many services that are available, for example:
How do I subscribe?
To configure your chosen feed reader software you simply need to point it to an XML file that is hosted on the HRR web site, and instruct it to pull that file as often as you like (typically every 30 minutes or so). When suitable content (news, results, forthcoming events) on the HRR site are added or modified, this XML file will be updated, and your feed reader will notify you of the update at the next time it updates the XML file.
There are several ways of configuring your feed reader to pull the XML file, the simplest are:
You can configure most feed readers to update as frequently as you like, and alert you to new content in a multitude of ways.
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