Introduction
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but what it means to you is a way to keep up with a lot of information from a lot of web sites with minimal work. Most websites now offer an automated way to let you keep up with the new content on that site. The new information is placed into a file called an RSS feed that software can use to compare with the last time you received information from that site and present the new information to you in a convenient way without having to poll that web site manually every time.
You subscribe to a feed, and Icon checks the feed and downloads any new items in that feed.
By default, Icon comes with a few feeds to get you started, but you will wish to add more feeds that are of interest to you.
Using RSS Reader
When you first start the reader, the program shows you categories of feeds.
To open a category, press Right Arrow. Icon announces the subcategory or the title of the feed. Keep pressing Right Arrow until you get the list of articles for that feed.
To close a category or feed's article list, press Left Arrow. To move from feed to feed or article to article in a feed list, use Up Arrow and Down Arrow.
To open an article to read it or to listen to a podcast, press Right Arrow or Select at the article's title.
To close a story and return to the article list, press Cancel.
Adding a New Feed
To add a new feed, move to the folder into which you wish the feed to be organized, then select Add New Feed from the menu. You must know its address or the URL of the web page containing that feed.
The most effective means of adding a feed is using the web page that contains the link to the feed. RSS Reader searches the web page and presents a list of feeds it finds. Use the arrows to pick the feed of interest, then press OK to subscribe to it.
In addition to using the web page that contains the feed, RSS Reader accepts the direct url of the feed. Often, feeds have the extension .xml, so a typical url might look like this: http://www.blindcooltech.com/bct.xml
To determine a feed's address, browse to the web page of the site that contains the feed, then click on the feed link. Depending on the browser in use, you will see different options, but it is fairly safe to say that what you see will not be very appealing. Depending on the browser with which you examine the feed, you'll either see the raw XML data or a series of links. These links contain the RSS data and are not really meant to be read by a human. What is of interest to you is the address of the feed.
To add the feed to the RSS reader, open the RSS Reader's menu and pick Add Feed. Type that address into the space provided, then press OK.
Update All Feeds
To gather all the new information for any of your feeds, select Update All Feeds from the RSS Reader's menu. When you select this option, the reader begins gathering all the new stories, but you may continue to work as if nothing at all were going on. Notice that as you move from feed to feed in the list, the reader displays status information about where that feed is in the update process.
To cancel a feed update, open the program menu and select Stop Feed Update.
Download Podcasts
Podcasts are special RSS feeds that contain files attached to each article. In the case of a podcast, you are generally more interested in the attached audio or video than you are in the actual article with is usually just a summary of the attached file. The RSS application downloads these attached files when you select this menu option.
When an RSS feed contains attachments to the feed, as do podcasts, RSS Player displays a list of the attached files. If the file has not yet been downloaded, Icon lets you know by saying either "Marked for Download" or "Not Marked for Download." This announcement lets you know the download status of the file. You may toggle between downloading and not downloading with the Select key. If it says neither of these before announcing the name of the file, that attachment is already downloaded, and you may press Select to play it.