RSS and Podcasts
The Saint Paul web site offers an RSS feed of our news section so you can stay up to date on Saint Paul news and events more easily than ever before! We also offer a podcast of our sermons so you can easily take them with you.
What is RSS?
Think about all of the information that you access on the Web on a day-to-day basis; news headlines, search results, “What’s New”, job vacancies, and so forth. Most people want to keep track of a number of these things, but it becomes difficult once there are more than a handful of sources. This is because they have to go to each page one at a time and sort through the clutter of pop-up ads, logins, and widely varying web site layouts.
A new technology has become available that allows for web sites to create what are called "RSS Feeds". These feeds are basically just specially formatted web pages that computer programs called "RSS Readers" or "RSS Aggregators" can read.
Once a feed is available, someone can add the feed to their RSS Reader and then the computer can regularly fetch the file to get the most recent items from each site. Now information from dozens of sites can be brought together into a single computer program that displays only the newest information in a consistent manner.
There are dozens of RSS Readers available for download. Each offers slightly different features. RSS is also supported by the Macintosh Tiger web browser and Mozilla Firefox.
For more information on RSS and some reviews of RSS Readers check out this site.
What is Podcasting?
Podcasting is like RSS but instead of gathering text information from the web it gathers audio files. These audio files may then be played on a computer, or more commonly on portable music devices like iPods. People with iPods can use the latest version of iTunes to download audio MP3 files (like our sermons) to their iPod for playback on the train or in their car. Users of other portable MP3 players may use software such as iPodder or some RSS readers to download feeds to their players.
For more information on the basics of Podcasting check out this site.
Fore more information on Podcasting with iTunes and iPods check out this site.
