What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows users to automatically recieve a portion of a website's content delivered automatically to their desktop when new content is available. Its purpose is to keep users informed about topics of interest to them without making it necisary to visit the site. Each RSS feed consists of multiple items, or bits of news or audio from a website. You can read more detailed information about RSS at Wikipedia.

To recieve an RSS feed, you need two things:
1. An RSS reader or podcatcher
2. A feed to subscribe to

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What's Special About Our Feed?

Fray Away The Edges' RSS feed will give you general information about site updates and The Fray in the form of text and the occasional podcast. Because we wanted to be able to send you podcasts on occasion, our RSS feed is different than most; it is a hybrid between a traditional RSS feed that sends users text information and a podcast feed that typically delivers audio files. Typically, to recieve podcasts you need podcatching software instead of an RSS reader, but this is not the case with our feed. Any RSS reader will give you full access to our feed and allow you to recieve the podcasts (although you can use podcatching software if you prefer).

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Get a Reader and Subscribe to a Feed

The first thing you need to do to subscribe to our RSS feed is download an RSS reader or a podcatcher. We highly recommend just getting a plain RSS reader because we won't be podcasting very often and a moderate amount of text is difficult to read in a podcatcher; podcatchers were designed to recieve audio files, not text. However, if you're a more experienced user and are really attatched to your podcatcher, you can recieve our feed through your podcatcher. Just subscribe to the feed as usual.

Here are some of the more popular free RSS readers: RSS Reader, Sharp Reader, and Feed Reader. Download whichever one you're more comfortable with- they'll all deliver feed updates to you without visiting a single webpage. Or, if you don't like any of these, search for "RSS reader" in your favoite search engine and pick one from the list of results.

Next you need to subscribe to a feed. The procedure for doing this differs depending on which RSS reader you're using, but at the most basic level there will be a button somewhere that you can click on to add a feed. (You might want to read through the documentation that comes with your reader for specific instructions on how to add feeds.) When it asks for the URL of a feed, paste in the URL of our feed. You can get the URL in multiple ways, but its easiest to right-click (Mac: cmmd + click)on the orange "XML" button on our navigation bar. You'll get the option to "Copy link location" or something similar. This will copy the URL and you can now paste it into your RSS reader.

To retrieve the podcast using an RSS reader, all you need to do is click on the link for the full article or the "read more" link and the audio file will download. (Again, the name of the link will depend on your software, but it will be something similar.)

You should now be subscribed to our feed and recieve updates when they are available. You don't need to do anything else; the RSS reader will automatically check for updates and let you know when there's something new.

...While you're at it, why not subscribe to The Fray's official RSS feed? You can subscribe to their feed using the same reader you've already downloaded, and they'll provide you with official news. (And probably update more often that we do.)

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