Benton County - What is RSS?

Some pages on the Benton County website will have links identified with the following icon:

This icon links to an RSS feed of some or all of the content on each page. These feeds are RSS version 2.0 and can be accessed directly via the link, for bookmarking in your favorite RSS reader and keeping up to date on content changes at Benton County's website with a click.

The large RSS icon you see in the bottom left of the site at all times links to a summary page of all RSS feeds available on the County website. This page also provides links for easy placement of your desired RSS feeds onto Google, Yahoo and Windows Live portal pages.

In general, RSS feeds will be provided for pages that have either frequent or rapidly updating content. Not all pages on Benton County's website will have RSS feeds. Those that do will have the identifying icon near the content included in the feed for easy access.

Defining RSS

Wikipedia entry on RSS.

The following information comes from the "What Is RSS" page at XML.com:

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.