The CBAA, CBOnline and CBF websites now all provide an RSS feed of recent updates, additions and amendments to the site.

If you're not fammilier with RSS, read the article below for an explanation of what they are, and how they work.

If you already use an RSS Reader, the links to the feeds are as follows -

- CBAA Web Updates
http://feeds.feedburner.com/CBAA_Website_Updates

- CBOnline Web Updates http://feeds.feedburner.com/CBOnline-WhatsNew

- CBF Updates
http://www.cbf.com.au/Content/rss.asp?z=47

- CBF News
http://www.cbf.com.au/Content/rss.asp?z=16

The CBAA has customised an RSS reader called Feedreader with feeds from the CBAA, CBOnline and CBF. You can download and install this and instantly start receiving the important news from the community broadcasting sector.

NOTE: Unfortunatly, this is a Windows only product at this stage. We will search for other customisable options for Mac and Linux users. For thos on a Mac or Linux platform, scroll down to see some other options.

The internet changes pretty quickly. New technology seems to be launched on an almost daily basis and web content – well, there's currently estimated to be around 1 billion users online, 350 million active domains, who knows how many individual websites?! – to put it in simple terms, the internet is big, it changes a lot and it changes fast!

So how can anyone be expected to keep up with everything on the net? The reality is, you can't – the sheer size of the net makes it impossible. So the thing to do is to find tools to help you keep up to date with at least some of the things you're interested in. RSS in one such tool and the CBAA, CBOnline and CBF websites are now all running RSS feeds.

Before you get scarred off by yet another internet acronym – relax, RSS is pretty straightforward. In fact RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a way of making content from a website easily accessible and useable. One use of RSS is for people with websites a no fuss way of displaying some content from other websites. For example, a member station could use the CBAA's RSS feed to display all the latest updates from the CBAA site on their own site.

But where RSS is really usefull is for the average web user. For the average web user you can install a feed reader, subscribe to all the sites that interest you – it could be 2 it could be 20 – and then all the information updated on those sites is delivered to your reader. It means you can monitor all of your favorite sites in one handy accessible location. You no longer need to browse through all your favorite sites to find a handful of interesting articles – you can now browse through all the 'headlines' in your feed reader and pick the articles which interest you.

The bottom line is: RSS is a tool to make keeping up with lots of website, very simple.

Not every site on the net has an RSS feed – the way to tell is simply by looking for the RSS icon – it's pictured here although online it will appear orange. With your feedreader installed, simply click on that icon on any site you like viewing and you'll subscribe yourself to the feed.

To make life easy for our members the CBAA has found a simple RSS reader which you can install on your computer with feeds for CBAA, CBOnline and CBF all preconfigured. You can download it from this page (scroll back to the top.)

Unfortunately at this stage, Feedreader is only available for PC's. But there is a range of other options available for other operating systems and information on these is also available at the same page on the CBAA site.

Windows - FeedReader, SharpReader, News Gator, FeedDemon and AmphetaDesk


OS X - MulleNewz, NetNewsWire Lite and AmphetaDesk
GNU/Linux - Straw
Browser based - Mozilla's Firefox has built in support for RSS News feeds with its live bookmarks . Firefox also has a range of extensions that also allow you to view RSS News Feeds. Newsgator, BlogLines and Google Reader all offer web based aggregation services.


Email clients - Some of the latest email clients such as Mozilla's Thunderbird have built in support for RSS.


You can also try searching for "RSS newsreader" or visit the Google RSS directory.