RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which was originally designed to allow websites to share snippets of information in a standardised format. More recently, however, it's become a system which lets website visitors 'subscribe' to news feeds and keep up to date on any number of topics.

Hopefully this brief guide will help you get the most out of the many RSS feeds available - a list of all those offered by Just Flight and Just Trains is shown at the bottom of this page. It's the ideal way to keep up with our News, Support updates and more.

HOW DO I SUBSCRIBE?

Look out for the orange RSS button - it is usually a rectangle with 'RSS' written on it or, more recently, a square button with a circle and two white lines radiating out of it, which is increasingly used as the logo for RSS feeds.

You'll find this button also glows orange near to the top right of your Internet Explorer window if an RSS feed has been detected on the page, and in Firefox it shows up in the address bar.

When you see one of these icons you can click on it to be taken to the RSS file itself, and depending on your web browser one of two things will happen:

1) You'll be shown a nicely formatted page which gives you an option to add the feed (or 'subscribe' to it). If you get this, then subscribe to the feed and it'll automatically update every time there is news from your chosen feed.

2) You'll see a page full of code. If you get this then it isn't quite so easy to subscribe, as you've either got an old web browser that doesn't support RSS feeds or something else may have gone wrong - you can, however, copy the address of the page from the address bar and paste this in to your RSS reader.

Exact details of how to subscribe vary depending on the web browser you are using, but generally you just click on the button and it'll take you to a page which shows the latest items in the RSS feed, and usually gives you a link or button to subscribe.

HOW DO I VIEW THE FEEDS?

It's all well and good being subscribed to RSS feeds, but you'll also need to view them somehow.

In Internet Explorer 7 you can see updates to your feeds by clicking on the orange Favourites Centre 'star' at the top left of the browser window, which pops out a tab on the left of your screen - you can pin this out so as it remains on screen while you're browsing the internet by clicking on the small arrow on the top right of that panel.

To see the feeds, just click on the Feeds option at the top of the menu. When they are showing in bold text it means that the feed has new items since you last checked it, and clicking on the RSS Feed will show it in the main browser window. Clicking on any of the headlines will take you to the selected news article.

In Firefox you can have RSS Feeds as 'Live Bookmarks', and these can be either within the Bookmarks menu or show up across the top of the browser in the Bookmarks toolbar. As with Internet Explorer, when the feed is updated it will turn bold and you can click on it to see the new updates.

RSS feeds can also be set up to be viewed in other websites, so you may want to add them to My Yahoo or Google Reader. If you have Google Mail then you'll see that it shows a headline across the top of your e-mail Inbox which is generated from the RSS feeds which you have configured via their Reader and which can be controlled to display the feeds you want to see (and to remove some of the various random ones that Google give you by default) by going to Settings > Web Clips once you’ve logged in to your Gmail Inbox.

In addition to web browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox, there are of course lots of RSS feed readers out there, such as Newz Crawler / FeedDemon, Bloglines and NewsGator Online.

USING WINDOWS VISTA?

If you use Windows XP you may have spotted a sidebar down the right hand side of your screen. One of the features on this is the ability to display headlines pulled from RSS feeds, so this is another great way of keeping up to date with your favourite websites.

Assuming you already have the sidebar showing the RSS feed application, all you need to do is click on 'Show Headlines' and it will start to work, pulling in RSS feeds which you have subscribed to in Internet Explorer.

If you'd like to limit the RSS feeds to just one site then you can select that by clicking on the magnifying glass and selecting the properties.

Still confused? There is an excellent video explaining RSS in plain English on YouTube.

JUST FLIGHT & JUST TRAINS RSS FEEDS

Click on the links below to subscribe to our RSS feeds.

	RSS Feed	My MSN	Windows Live	My Yahoo	Google
Just Flight News
Just Trains News
Blogs
YouTube Channel
Support Alerts