BBC Gardeners' World

RSS Feed Help

About RSS

Using RSS, or ‘Really Simple Syndication’, allows you to see when your favourite sites from all over the internet have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and articles in one place, as soon as they are published, without having to remember to visit each site every day.

How do I start using RSS feeds?

The first thing you need is something called a news reader. This is a piece of software that checks RSS feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added to them.

How do I get a news reader?

You can get both web-based and downloadable news readers. Web-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable news readers let you store them on your main computer. This is similar to the difference between Hotmail which you can look at from any computer and Outlook which is stored on your own computer.

It’s up to you which you prefer, and most news reader providers offer basic or trial versions for free. Here is a selection:

For Windows (downloadable)

• Newz Crawler - www.newzcrawler.com
• FeedDemon - www.feeddemon.com
• Awasu - www.awasu.com

For Mac OS X

• Newsfire - www.newsfirerss.com
• NetNewsWire - ranchero.com/netnewswire

Web-based news readers

• Bloglines - www.bloglines.com
• My Yahoo! - my.yahoo.com
• NewsGator - www.newsgator.com/ngs

BBC Worldwide is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what you want to receive in your news reader by finding and subscribing to the relevant RSS feeds. For example, if you would like the latest BBC UK headlines, simply visit the BBC UK news section on bbc.co.uk and you will notice an orange RSS button on the left-hand side.

If you click on the button, the RSS feed page will appear and you can subscribe to it in various ways. This includes dragging the web address of the RSS feed into your news reader or by copying and pasting the web address into your news reader in the designated area. To ‘subscribe’ you do not need pay or give your personal details.

Most sites that offer RSS feeds use a similar orange RSS button, but some may just have a normal weblink to the feed.

Gardeners' World has one feed currently available:

• Blog posts

Additional information

Browser support
Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for RSS feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This can make subscribing to RSS feeds much easier. For more details on these, please check their websites.

• www.mozilla.com/support
• www.apple.com/safari
• www.opera.com

BBC Worldwide is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Using Mozilla Firefox to create a “Live Bookmark” using RSS

When you visit a webpage and you see an orange icon at the far right of the address bar it means that the page contains an RSS feed that you can subscribe to (if you are using an old version of the browser this icon may appear in the status bar in the bottom right).

You can add the feed by clicking on the orange icon and subscribing to one. If there is more than one RSS feed, Firefox shows a list from which you can pick one.

The Add Live Bookmark dialogue box appears. A Live Bookmark is similar to a standard folder you might create in your bookmarks list, but instead of containing manually collected bookmarks, it will contain live links from the RSS feed that are updated automatically.

You may prefer to add the Live Bookmarks to the Bookmarks toolbar folder, normally shown under the navigation toolbar, so you can view recent content with just one mouse click.

Using RSS feeds on your site

If you run your own website, you can use RSS feeds to display the latest headlines from other sites on your site.

We encourage the use of Gardeners' World RSS feeds as part of a website, subject to our RSS Feed Standard License Terms.

However, we do require that the proper format and attribution is used when BBC Worldwide content appears. The attribution text should read “BBC Gardeners' World” or “From BBC Gardeners' World” as appropriate. You may not use any BBC logo or other BBC trademark.

We reserve the right to prevent the distribution of Gardeners' World content. Please read our Terms and Conditions for further instructions.

BBC Worldwide does not accept any liability for its RSS feeds. Please see the Terms and Conditions for full details.