What is a News feed?

As the name suggests, it is an online pipeline to the latest news from the Office of Alumni Relations.

The big difference is that the news comes to you, direct to your desk top, rather than you having to go to AlumNET to discover the exciting news and events we have to offer.

What is RSS?

Without getting too technical, RSS allows us to set up news items and deliver them to personal feeds readers, or via the Internet Explorer 7 browsers. This is Web.20 in action.

You may have noticed a small icon  on our front page?

If you click on it you will see a page of code – something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
etc.etc.

Rather boring stuff really but don’t worry. 
The essential piece of information is the web address (URL) itself which is https://www.alumni.nus.edu.sg/web/alumni/subscribenews/index.xml

This is the address you will need to copy and paste into your News Reader.

IE
As mentioned above, if you are using the latest version of Internet Explorer (version 7) then it comes with a built in News reader.

Mozilla Firefox
If you are using Firefox as your browser you can download an extension called News Fox 0.8
You need to have the latest edition of Firefox to install this (2.0.0.7 and above).

Once you do so with Firefox you will see a small icon besides the Home icon on your browser tool bar.
Simply click on this to open the feed reader functionality. Click the icon with the small green cross on the secondary tool bar, enter our feed address and click OK.  Then click on the blue arrows icon (far left on the secondary tool bar).  This will update the news for you. Simply click on any item to get the details

Feadreader 3
A nifty and free feedreader .  It is probably the pick of free readers and has a news flash pop up.

Once you get involved with news feeds you are easily able to tailor a menu of news that matches your interests.  Most major news providers have this free subscriber service.

For example, the BBC has a selection of Sports RSS feeds .
e.g. The football feed is http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/sportonline_uk_edition/football/rss.xml

The BBC news feeds can be found at this site (link to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm )

CNN Feeds are at this address

Channel NewsAsia can be found here

Go to Yahoo News Search . Enter a subject that you like and then press the News Search button.

You will notice a red RSS button  on the right.  If you click on this and then copy the address you see in the address panel of your tool bar (it will be lengthy!) into you News Reader, you will have set up a subscription for future news on your favourite topic.

The beauty of News Feeds is that they update for you without you having to travel to a web site. 

Catch up with the latest news when you want to.  You are in fact setting up your own online news service. Enjoy!