Guild RSS Feed

Guild RSS Feed

The Guild has an RSS feed to provide news to members and others on Guild events. The feed includes Guild News Releases, Chairman's Newsflashes and information on forthcoming Guild Seminars. This allows those with RSS Readers (sometimes called News Readers or News Aggregators) to read about Guild news along with information from other news providers and 'blogs'.

What is RSS? It stands for Really Simple Syndication, though it originally meant Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. One of the best introductions to RSS is provided by the BBC, see here. The LDS Family Search site also provides good information on the subject here.

The objective of RSS is to allow you to read a group of news stories from multiple sources on your PC, customised to your personal requirements. So apart from the Guild's news, you might want to read the Guild Forum messages or Dick Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter. Or, of course, the BBC headlines. Rather than going to each of these sites, you can have all their headlines brought together in one place. As well as news feeds, most 'blogs' now provide an RSS feed.

Many sites advertise their RSS feed address using this symbol:

There are several ways of reading RSS feeds. Firstly, you could use a News Reader program on your computer, such as Feedreader or Awasu. There are many other such programs, but if you want the news easily visible to you, it's better to read RSS feeds by a program you probably have open the whole time: your web browser or e-mail program. Many e-mail programs now allow you to create folders to display news feeds as well as e-mail. Even better, there are websites that allow you to create your own customised list of feeds. These include iGoogle (sign up from the regular Google front page), Google Reader, My Yahoo and my own favourite Netvibes. Several of these allow you to add not only news but many other useful 'Widgets' or 'Apps' to the page, so bringing many useful items together on a personalised page.

Once you have decided which kind of RSS reader you are going to use, you will need to provide it with the URL address of the Guild's RSS feed, which is

http://www.one-name.org/rss/news.xml

To add the Guild's or any other news feed, you need to look for the means to "Add a Channel" or "Add Content".

Here are some other useful feed addresses:

Guild Forum: http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/rss/g/goons/GOONS.rss
Guild Facebook Wall: https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=118406684856729&format=rss20
Guild Twitter Stream: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/121782745.rss
Dick Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/atom.xml
News from The National Archives: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/rss/news.xml
Luxegen Genealogy and Family History: http://www.luxegen.ca/feed/rss/
Scottish Genes: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottishGenealogyNewsAndEventssgne

You can also create your own RSS feed if you have a Blog for your one-name study.

Here's mine: http://hollyer.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

To find other genealogy blogs, try here: http://blogfinder.genealogue.com

You can even add feeds to let you see your Facebook notifications.

All these addresses point to XML files, rather than traditional webpages (HTML). Originally, they were only intended to be read directly by other computers, not people. However, by adding a stylesheet, most feeds can now be read directly by browsers. Indeed, most popular browsers (except Google Chrome) recognise a news feed and add their own 'skin' to it. You can try this by directly viewing the Guild's feed in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari - each has its own way of displaying the same information. (Google Chrome uses the Guild-provided stylesheet to make the feed visible). That's why all the RSS links listed above can be directly viewed - but it is not the intention that you read a feed in this way - the whole point is to aggregate all your feeds onto one page.

Once you get the hang of RSS, you will appreciate that it is a half-way house between 'push technology' such as e-mail notifications and 'pull technology' where you visit a website to look for news. Your RSS news reader 'pulls' the feed pages every so often on your behalf (you can usually set the timing) and pushes the aggregated results onto your news page/reader program. Unlike e-mails which can get lost in transit or end up in spam boxes, RSS messages will always arrive.

RSS will not be suitable for all of you. It is a supplement to, and not a replacement for, the Guild's other means of publication, eg JOONS, the Website, the Chairman's Newsflash, the Forum, not forgetting our Facebook and Twitter pages. But if you lead a busy life and want an overview of all your important stuff on one page, then News Feeds will be of great value.

If you are experiencing problems with RSS, please contact me via

I hope you find the RSS feed useful.

Peter Walker

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