Ishikawajets.org offers a variety of RSS feeds designed to make it even easier for you to keep abreast of the latest things happening in the prefecture and the JET community. By syndicating the site you can be automatically notified every time a new entry is posted without having to manually check the site countless times a day.
The following feeds are available. Please copy the url for your desired feed into your RSS 2.0 compatible newsreader.
| Available Feeds (RSS 2.0) | Feed Description |
| Basic RSS 2.0 | The most basic feed. Provides links to the last 10 posted items. Recommended you at least subscribe to this link if nothing else. |
| The Works | Full Entry texts of the last 15 items posted to the site in all categories. |
| Excerpts | Links to the last 15 items posted to the site plus excerpts. |
| Announcements | Full text of the last 15 items posted in the P.A. Announcements/Site News section. It's a good idea to subscribe to this to keep up with the latest news and announcements. the P.A.s.. |
| Events | Links to the last 15 items posted in the Events section plus excerpts. |
| Entertainment | Links to the last 15 items posted in the Entertainment section plus excerpts. |
So just what is RSS? Here's a brief explanation taken from Wikipedia.
RSS is used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. An orange rectangle with the letters XML or RSS is often used as a link to a site's RSS feed.
In 2004 and 2005, use of RSS spread to many major news organizations, including Reuters and the Associated Press, after several years of use by weblogs, technology publications and other early adopters. The first online news site to use RSS feeds was Variety.com in June of 2002. Under various usage agreements, providers allow other websites to incorporate their "syndicated" headline or headline-and-short-summary feeds.
RSS is widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries' headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files. (See podcasting, broadcatching and MP3 blogs.)
A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled webpages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. RSS saves users from having to repeatedly visit favorite websites to check for new content or be notified of updates via email. It is now very common to find RSS feeds on most major web sites, as well as many smaller ones.
Feed Readers or news aggregators are typically constructed as extensions to a web browser, as extensions to an email program, or as standalone programs. Some programs now also have native support of RSS and/or Atom.
Web-based feed readers and news aggregators require no software installation and make the user's "feeds" available on any computer with Web access.
Some aggregators syndicate (combine) RSS feeds into new feeds, e.g. take all football related items from several sports feeds and provide a new football feed.
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You'll need a feed reader (sometimes called a "feed aggregator") to access the ishikawajets.org RSS feeds. There are literally dozens up dozens of freely downloadable feed readers out there - all you need to do is run a quick google search and take your pick! Also, be aware that most modern browsers (which means not Internet Explorer) come with feed readers built in (Firefox and Safari, for example. IE users can add RSS functionality to their browsers via the freeware Pluck plug-in).
While there are too many feed readers out there to recommend one or two as "the best", the following are some of the feed readers ishikawajets.org users have used in the past:
Windows: Feed Reader (simple but efficient), Sharpreader (another simple but efficient reader), Wizz RSS (enhances Firefox), Desktop Sidebar (wonderful tool that has sophisticated RSS feed reader built in)
Mac OS X: Netnews Wire Lite (freeware version available)
Linux: Straw (popular open source feedreader for linux users)
Other: RSSgenr8 (html scraper that will let you create RSS feeds for sites without them. Geeky stuff)
If you would like a list of other feed readers, you can try blogspace.com's recommended list or Wikipedia's (rather exhaustive) list.