RSS Feeds

The RSS feed for a feature on The Spring Mountain

The Spring Mountain Society will generate RSS feeds for everything from Latest Activity updates to Photos to Forum discussions. You can use a feed reader to keep up with the action without having to visit the website all the time.

If you do it the way I do, you use iGoogle for your home page. It’s handy because the Google search is right there and you can customize the page for your interests. Then you sign up for the google reader. To follow something on the Spring Mountain Society social network you simply find the RSS feed button below whatever you are interested in following, click it, and a page pops up where you can add the feed to your homepage or to the Google reader. One more click and thereafter when you go to the iGoogle homepage or the google reader you will see what is new in what you are interested in.

More General Instructions for iGoogle or another external website.

Adding the network's RSS feed to an external website is incredibly easy. Just locate the type of content you'd like to follow. The forum is a great place to start. To get the RSS feed of latest discussions and replies in the forum, head to the Forum tab. Scroll to the bottom of the page and find the "RSS" icon and link.

Copy the URL of this link. You can get even more specific and follow only discussions in a particular category or even only discussions with a particular tag if you'd like.

Next, go to your external website or feedreader of choice. A good place to start is iGoogle, which is easy to configure and comes with a bunch of default feeds that will give you an idea of how you can use RSS. To add a feed to your iGoogle, click the "Add stuff" link at the top right of the page. Next, at the bottom of the left column, click the "Add feed or gadget" next to the RSS icon.

Paste in the URL of the RSS feed you copied from your social network and click the "Add" button. Once your feed has successfully been added, click the "Back to iGoogle home" link at the top left of the page. Your new feed will appear in the top left corner of the page.