What Is RSS?

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". RSS allows you to stay up to date with the latest updates on websites that support it.

Prior to RSS, the only way to see the latest changes on a website is to go back and visit it. With RSS, these updates and changes are delivered directly to you, as soon as they are published. You no longer have to remember to visit the site every day.

Not all websites support RSS today, but it is rapidly growing in popularity. Websites that do support it include CBC, BBC, CNN, New York Times, and of course, our very own ECBC!

A website that offers an RSS feed will display the RSS button as shown here.

How Do I View RSS Feeds?

There are two main mechanisms for viewing RSS feeds: (1) using an RSS News Reader, or (2) using a web portal that can take RSS feeds.

For our site, we've provided shortcut buttons to add the ECBC RSS feed to the most common portal pages -- My Yahoo! , Google , and My MSN . Clicking one of these buttons will add the ECBC RSS feed to your corresponding personalized homepage. (You may need to sign up for an account with these portals in order to access your personalized homepage.)

Once you've added the feed, you will see a section titled "ECBC - Evangelical Chinese Bible Church" on your personalized homepage. This section contains a number of ECBC news items and are updated as soon as new content is published on this site. Depending on the settings of the personalized homepage, you may also see the date and time that each news item was published. Some personal homepages also allow you to configure how many news items to display in each section.

ECBC on Your Personalized Homepage

The following image shows how the ECBC RSS Feed would look on My Yahoo!

The following image shows how the ECBC RSS Feed would look on Google.

The following image shows how the ECBC RSS Feed would look on My MSN.

Adding ECBC to Your Browser's Bookmarks

Additionally, some browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Netscape allow you to add RSS feeds directly to your browser's bookmark.

In Firefox, the following orange icon appears in the address bar if the current website provides an RSS feed. Clicking on this icon allows you to add this feed to the browser's bookmarks.

In Netscape, the following orange icon appears in the address bar if the current website provides an RSS feed. Clicking on this icon allows you to add this feed to the browser's toolbar.

The following image shows the ECBC RSS feed in Netscape's toolbar.