What is an RSS Feed?

RSS is an abbreviation which has evolved to mean "Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication." Either way, it provides a way of formatting information on the GAA Basketball website so it can be "published" as news stories that can be picked up for viewing/publishing by an external website or program known as a News Reader or News Aggregator. These facilities allow news items from  GAABasketball.org and a vast number of other news sources to be viewed within your personalized home page on My MSN, My Yahoo, Google, or in a website or program that does only news aggregation. Think of it as having the ability to create your own website or news page containing only items that interest you.

How will this help me?

It makes it easier to stay informed about all the news and events you care about. Once setup, you can view GAA Basketball News Items along with any other headlines important to you in your favorite home page or news reader (like MSN, Yahoo, etc.)  This means as soon as you start your browser, you will see the top headlines from the GAA Basketball site without having to visit there. These will be displayed next to news from other sources you have selected including the weather, stock prices, Blogs, World News, etc. In short, it saves you time and improves your ability to easily stay informed.

How can I get started using this?

The easiest way to see this at work is to use with your My MSN or your My Yahoo web pages. If you don't have an account with either, they are both free services that you can register for. The following buttons will add GAA Basketball news items to your personalized home page, while the links to the right will take you to website specific help on adding the GAA Basketball news feeds to these pages manually.

		Adding to My MSN
		Adding to My Yahoo
		Adding to Google

How do I tell my news reader to find the GAA Basketball RSS News Feed?

In most news readers, you will need to enter the URL of the GAABasketball.org RSS News Feed:

http://www.GAABasketball.org/rss_news.asp

This is also the same link associated with the image on the left side of the page. 

What else can I do with the news feed?

Another option is a dedicated News Reader, also known as a News Aggregator. These are useful because they let you collect news from many different services and display only the news items that interest you. They can collect the news locally so if you have a laptop, you can read the news stories even when you are not connected to the Internet. Here are some well known and respected news aggregators:

NewsGator (online reader)

RssReader (program based news reader)