Here at GayCalgary, we are continually pushing the envelope, providing our readers, visitors, and community partners the many benefits that new and popular technologies can offer. But with every technological addition, there is an associated learning curve (and in some cases a price tag) that may deter some from taking full advantage. We want to help you keep up!

Most major media outlets, including TV stations and papers use Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a method of broadcasting news content to any number of destinations: your personal computer or laptop, your mobile device, even to your Facebook profile! Some RSS publishers will only give you a preview of the item with a direct link to read the remainder on their website, while others may give you the whole shebang. RSS contains encoded information about things like authorship, publication date, etc. and the main body can contain text, images, links, and other multimedia such as videos and sound. The cool part is that the information is live; so very soon after the source is updated, all subscribers (aka. consumers) of the feed receive those updates the next time their device refreshes.

So how is this any different from just going to a website, like MSN.ca, and reading the articles there? Well, in a lot of cases RSS feeds can save you the time and trouble of browsing through volumes of information to find something that interests you – especially if you just want to see what’s new. Some websites provide multiple RSS feeds (aka. channels) dedicated to groupings of related content like sports, theatre, music, and so on – so you only need to subscribe to the ones that are relevant to your interests. Furthermore, you can use RSS to collect items from many different sources and then read them all in one place, which saves you from the usual routine of navigating to (and through) your thee or four favorite news websites.

Now, it’s all very well to know something like this is out there, but how can you access it? The remainder of this article will talk about a number of easily available ways to subscribe to RSS feeds, followed by a summary of the exciting RSS feeds now available through GayCalgary.com.

Accessing RSS

Internet Explorer and Firefox

Some websites embed information about available RSS feeds in their underlying structure, but you wouldn’t be able to find it without viewing the webpage source and sifting through its guts. However, Internet Explorer 7 (and newer versions of the popular browser) has an RSS icon that lights up in the presence of this information, providing a convenient drop down list that will take you right to the feed that you select.

Furthermore, IE has a built in utility for viewing RSS feeds that will display the RSS items nicely, and allow for simple operations like sorting by title, date, category, and searching. You can subscribe to the feed by clicking the “Subscribe to this feed” link that appears in the RSS viewer, and it will add a bookmark in the Feeds area of your favorites menu so that you can easily return to it again.

Firefox provides very similar capabilities – just look for the RSS icon beside the address bar. However, Firefox also gives you the option to automatically pass the subscription off to Microsoft Outlook, browse for a custom application of your choice, or select a few other online services like Bloglines, My Yahoo!, and Google.

One hopes that the latest versions of other popular web browsers also provide these capabilities. Failing that, most sites display an RSS icon that will manually take you to their channel list. At the very least, you should be able to grab the URL for the feed to use in another program.

Microsoft Outlook

One of the most popular mail clients for Windows users, newer versions of MS Outlook have built in support for RSS feeds. In the Mail Folders sidebar underneath Personal Folders, you’ll likely find an “RSS Feeds” folder. Right click it and select “Add New RSS Feed…”, where you will then be prompted for the URL of the feed. You can grab this information right from the address bar in Internet Explorer, once you have navigated to the desired feed.

The nice thing about MS Outlook is that it adapts the feed to a readily understood E-mail metaphor. That is, each item in the feed is displayed as you would see a list of E-mails in your Inbox. Even handier is the fact that unread items are highlighted in bold, so you know what you’ve already read.

Windows Vista Sidebar

If you’re a Windows Vista user and haven’t turned off the Vista Sidebar application that comes standard with the operating system, then you have a convenient little RSS viewer at your fingertips. You may have removed it, not knowing what it was, but once you have added it again the application will automatically pull any feeds you have set up in Internet Explorer or MS Outlook and flash updates from the sidelines. You can configure which feeds from these sources that you prefer it to show.

Mobile Devices

If you own a Blackberry, Smartphone, or even an iPhone/iTouch, you probably have a basic RSS reader built in. If you search around online, you are likely to find nicer applications for free (a good one we found is called “Viigo”), or at a reasonable cost to purchase. A data plan will be required for retrieving feeds live from the internet, but on the bright side, they will likely be less awkward and take less bandwidth than visiting the websites that they come from. Even without a data plan, programs like AvantGo will help you load up your phone with your RSS items when you synch with your computer, so that you can read them on the go.

Your Website or Online Profile

For those who run or maintain a website, who have access to the underlying code and the knowledge of how to manipulate it, you can use an RSS feed to display relevant news headlines to visitors. However, you will need something to convert the raw RSS data to something more presentable. If your website can run server-side code (PHP, ASP, ASP .NET, etc.) there are pre-built libraries available for free to accomplish this. However, if your website is just plain HTML there are still plenty of free services to do this for you - typically they just ask you to embed a simple Javascript reference into your HTML document. A quick web search will turn up any of this information that you may need.

On mainstream profile sites like Facebook and MySpace, where the content you post is often stripped of any HTML tags that you may try to embed, you need to search for something to do the legwork for you. On Facebook, we recommend the RSS-Connect app – it lets you post several feeds to your page so that friends and visitors can see what you’re interested in. Similarly, MySpace has a whole list of apps to bring RSS to your online profile.

GayCalgary.com RSS Feeds

We’ve stretched the use of RSS feeds beyond their typical purpose – to give you live information not just about news and articles, but also monthly prize draws, community events, and GLBT business information for travelers. This offers a whole new way of tapping into Alberta’s GLBT community! Below is a list of the feeds now available on GayCalgary.com.

GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine – Articles

A complete list of articles featured in the latest edition of GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine. We still want you to pick up the magazine or read the online edition, so we’ve only provided a small portion of each article to stimulate your interest. Follow the link to read the full article in the online edition.

GayCalgary.com – Recent News

Read press releases and breaking news, updated weekly on our website. Much of this information doesn’t make it into our monthly magazine, so this is the only place you may find it! The link provided will take you to the full article on our website.

GayCalgary.com – Prize Draws

Get updates about the prizes that are up for grabs in our monthly online prize draws.

GayCalgary.com – Calgary/Edmonton Events

Get a complete list of upcoming events directly from our extensive online community events calendar. Full event details are provided, including event posters! This feed will soon be divided into Northern and Southern Alberta, rather than by city.

GayCalgary.com – Calgary/Edmonton Travel Info

Planning a trip to Alberta? Need to call your favorite bar but can’t remember the number? If you don’t have a copy of the magazine nearby, then this feed will definitely come in handy! It provides you with address and contact information for local gay bars and clubs, bathhouses, accommodations, and restaurants – including any recent advertising images – directly from our online business directory! This feed too will soon be divided into Northern and Southern Alberta, rather than by city.

More Coming Soon

We hope to have RSS feeds for new photographs and discussion forum topics within the next month or two.

Conclusion

RSS may sound cryptic and scary to the lay-person, but once you get to know it, you soon realize how useful and widely accessible it is. If you like keeping up to date on what’s going on in the world, it can save you a lot of hunting around. Of course, your access to RSS is limited to the technology that you possess, and in the end, a good old print copy is accessible by anyone!

Was this article still over your head? Are you confused about something else related to computers and other technologies within a GLBT context? Write us an E-mail (or send us a letter if it is easier), and we may cover your topic in a future edition of GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine! Our contact information is listed under “Sales & General Inquiries” in our Masthead (the black column beside the table of contents at the beginning of this edition).