This page provides a quick introduction to RSS along with details about using the RSS features of Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook. The IU Computer Science department publishes RSS feeds for general news items and the student web-based message boards so using RSS can help you manage this information.

What is RSS?

RSS is a mechanism used to publish content from sites providing things like news feeds, blogs, and podcasts. See the Wikipedia Entry for more details about the basics of RSS.

Why do I want to use RSS?

I don't know about you, but I find it rather annoying to visit a website and try to find out what new information has been added since the last time I viewed it. In order to keep up with Slashdot or the Computer Science Department Grad Student WebBoard I want to be able to easily see new articles that have been added and have an easy way to manage this information. This is exactly what RSS allows, providing a Feed containing information about new postings. Couple this with a nice RSS reader and you're all set.

How do I read RSS feeds?

There are many ways you can read RSS feeds. However, I find it most convenient to be able to manage and read my RSS feeds along with my email so I will focus primarily on using RSS with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client since that is what I use. However, there are a lot of Microsoft Outlook users in the world so I've included a section on using RSS with Outlook.

If you would prefer to use a web-based RSS reader (also called an aggregator), one that I have used and like is Google Reader. Since this is web-based, you don't need anything other than a web browser (like Firefox or IE) to use it. The Google Reader also has one really neat feature that helps manage a high article volume. Under Scroll Tracking preferences you can configure it to mark items as read when you scroll past them. This lets you quickly scan for items you want to read and have things disappear automatically as you scroll past them. This is one of those features you will probably either really like or really dislike depending on your reading habits.

There are dozens of other readers out there so this list is by no means complete.

How do I find RSS feeds?

RSS has become extremely popular and is supported by many sites these days. When you are viewing a web page with most modern web browsers (including Mozilla Firefox and IE) you will see the RSS icon () in the address bar for sites supporting RSS:

At this point, there are various way to get the address of the RSS feed which is what you will need in order to subscribe. On most sites, you can search for "RSS" in the page and you will find a link to the feed itself (which may display the raw XML for the feed) or a link to additional feed information. Poke around and you should find the location of the feed which will be a URL that starts with http://.

For example, if you go to the RSS link for CNN you will see a couple dozen rss feeds and the link for the Top Stories feed is http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss. It is this URL you will need when you go to subscribe to the feed as described in the next sections.

Note that you might have luck just clicking on the RSS icon () in the browser address bar. Some browser/reader combinations may do the right thing when you click this icon. With some browsers, clicking this icon will just let you add a Live Bookmark which probably isn't what you want.

Here are some RSS feeds available from the CS Department and School of Informatics Websites:

• http://www.cs.indiana.edu/news.rss - General CS news
• http://www.cs.indiana.edu/cgi-pub/gradvise/announcements.rss - CS Graduate Student Message Board
• http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/rssNews.asp - School of Informatics News
• http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/rssEvents.asp - School of Informatics Event (including Informatics/CS Colloquia)

You will find other RSS feeds on the CS website for things like class message boards so this is not a complete listing.

Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a freely available mail client that supports RSS very well. In order to use RSS, you must first create an RSS account:

1. From the Thunderbird Edit menu, select Account Settings
2. Click Add Account...
3. Select the account type of RSS News & Blogs and click Next
4. Enter the Account Name you want to use. This can be anything you want to use to identify the account.
5. Click Finish to create the account.

Once you have created the account, you will need to subscribe to the feeds of your choice:

1. Right click on the account (which should now be listed under Folders) and select Manage Subscriptions
2. Click Add to add a new feed
3. Enter the Feed URL (as explained above) and click OK.
4. Close the RSS Subscription window and the feed should now appear under your RSS account.

At this point, you can just click on the feed to view articles. However, you will almost certainly want to edit the retention policy of the feed, which controls the way you manage articles:

1. Right click on the feed and select Properties
2. Click the Retention Policy tab
3. From this tab, you can control how messages are removed. If this is a general news feed, like CNN or Slashdot, I like to set it to Delete messages more than 3 days old and Always delete read messages. The rationale being that anything from these sites more than a few days old is probably old news so you don't want to be bothered with all the old articles if you go a while without reading them. And, once you've read the article you probably don't care to see it again. Now, if this is a feed with articles you want to be sure you don't miss then you can leave the defaults alone, which will never auto-delete articles. If you are concerned about missing articles from a feed, please see the Note About Missing Articles below.

You can also set global preferences for all accounts by editing the RSS account properties. Just right click on the RSS account and select Properties. Here, you can set how frequently Thunderbird checks for new articles as well as whether you want to empty the Trash folder of delete messages when you exit.

Microsoft Outlook 2007

Note that Outlook 2003 and earlier do NOT support RSS. You will need to be using Outlook 2007 or newer to use RSS.

By default, when using Outlook 2007 you will see an RSS folder under Personal Folders. You can expand that folder to see your subscribed RSS feeds. To subscribe to a new RSS Feed follow these steps:

1. Select Account Settings... from the Outlook Tools menu
2. From the Account Settings page, click the RSS Feeds tab.
3. Click New... to add a new RSS feed.
4. Enter the feed location (as explained above) and click Add. For example, if you want to subscribe to the CS Department News Events feed, you would use http://www.cs.indiana.edu/news.rss
5. From the RSS Feed Options page set the Feed Name and then click OK.

Once you have added the new feed, it should appear under the RSS Feeds folder. Just click on the desired feed to view the articles. You can right click on the feed in the Mail Folders pane and select Properties to customize your view of the feed. From the Properties page, the most interesting part is the AutoArchive tab. From here, you can set various properties related to message archiving. For example, if you are reading a CNN news feed you may not care to see anything more than a couple days old so you can set it to delete items older than a specified number of days.

There is one feature supported by many RSS readers that doesn't seem to exist with Outlook 2007. This feature allows you to auto-delete any news items you have already read. I find this feature very useful when reading many news feeds so a message disappears automatically once I read it. If you know how to do this with Outlook please let me know and I will update this FAQ page.

Note About Missing Articles

It is important to understand the nature of rss feeds if it is important to you not to miss articles from an RSS feed. A typical news outlet like CNN or Slashdot may publish 20 items a day. Furthermore, the xml file for the feed (which is what your RSS reader is reading) may only contain the most recent 30 items. So, let's say you are using Thunderbird to read your RSS feeds and you read them on Monday. You exit Thunerbird and then go on vacation for a week and don't run it until you return the following Monday. When it reads the rss feed on your return it gets the most recent 30 items which may only be the articles for Sunday and Monday. This means that the articles from the other 5 days you were gone will not show up. If you are like me, this can be considered a feature. When I return from a week away from my email and rss feeds the last thing I want to see are the 100+ articles from CNN for the week.

Now, if you are using something like Google Reader it will continue to monitor the RSS feed in the background while you are gone and save up the old articles so you don't miss anything.

Using RSS with a Webboard on the CS systems

If you are managing a Web-Based Message Board on the CS systems, you can add an RSS feed by following the instructions in the FAQ entry on this topic.

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