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About RSS feeds

An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a service that many websites offer, and that you can make available from your iWeb site. When visitors subscribe to an RSS feed, they receive excerpts of the updated information on the site whenever the site posts new content.

From your iWeb site, you can let visitors subscribe to RSS feeds of blogs, podcasts, and photos and albums pages. Each of these pages includes a Subscribe button by default. (If you don’t want visitors to be able to subscribe, remove the Subscribe button—by deleting it from the blog or podcast page, or disallowing it in the Photos inspector—before you publish your site. They can still subscribe, however, by clicking their browser’s RSS button.)

The following happens when visitors subscribe to these media:

  • Your blog: Their RSS readers include your blog excerpts, including one media file per excerpt (a photo or movie, for example, that you dragged to the media placeholder for the entry in iWeb).

  • Your podcast: Your latest podcast episode is downloaded to the iTunes library on their computers the next time iTunes checks for new episodes.

  • Your blog with photos: You can let visitors download and subscribe to the photos by adding a “Subscribe to Photocast” button.

  • Your photos or albums pages: When a visitor subscribes, the latest photos published on the website are downloaded to the visitor’s computer in iPhoto. Visitors who don’t use a Mac or iPhoto see the latest photos from their RSS reader.

To subscribe to an RSS feed, you need an RSS reader, such as Safari. In Safari, after you’ve subscribed to a site’s feed, you can read it by clicking the RSS button in the Safari address field when you’re visiting the website. There are RSS aggregators as well, which provide a single place to read all the feeds you subscribe to.

Note:If you publish your site to a server or hosting service other than MobileMe, the Subscribe button works only if you provide your website’s address in the Website URL field in the Website Publishing Settings window.


Related Topics

Allowing visitors to subscribe to an RSS feed of your blog or podcast

Allowing visitors to subscribe to an RSS feed of your photos

If your Subscribe button doesn’t work

Adding RSS feeds from other websites

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