What's the orange icon on the Cumberland Public Schools home
page mean?
As we work to continually update and improve the Cumberland Public Schools website, we're introducing a news feed (also frequently called an RSS, RDF, XML, or Atom feed). The orange icon is a standard adopted by the Mozilla Organization and Microsoft to indicate to visitors that a news feed is available for a particular website. This news feed allows visitors to find out when new information is posted without having to actually visit the Cumberland Schools site to check. Many web sites are using news feeds to deliver updated information to their visitors. Some useful examples of sites that are using news feeds are:
- U.S. Government web portal, http://www.firstgov.gov/
- The State of Rhode Island, http://www.ri.gov/rex/feeds.php
- The Providence Journal, http://www.projo.com
- CNN, http://www.cnn.com
- MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.msn.com
How do I try out the Cumberland Public Schools news feed?
You use a piece of software or online service called an "aggregator" or "news reader" to subscribe to, collect, and update the feeds of the web sites you'd like to keep track of. If you're interested in trying out our news feed (or any of the feeds listed above), there are many free "aggregators" or readers to choose from. There are online services that you use within a web browser and there are programs that you can install right on your computer.
The simplest option is to use one of the many free online news aggregators or readers. You typically do not need to install any special software on your computer which is helpful if you don't feel comfortable installing software or if you're unable to due to security settings. Also, you will be able to access your news feeds from any computer connected to the internet simply by logging into the online news service of your choice.
Some suggestions for online news readers or news aggregator software are:
- Online options
- Bloglines, http://www.bloglines.com
- NewsGator, http://www.newsgator.com
- Google Reader Beta, http://www.google.com/reader
- Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux application
- RSS Owl, http://www.rssowl.org
- Firefox Extension (if you use Firefox as your web browser)
Once you choose an news aggregator or reader, follow the instructions for that particular service or application to subscribe to the Cumberland Public Schools news feed. The URL for our feed is http://www.cumberlandschools.org/rss/cps.xml