RSS feeds (sometimes called "Web feeds") are a way of presenting changing content in a format that can be understood by a computer program.
A typical example would be a news site that publishes new stories regularly. Here are some of the ways you could use that site's RSS feed:
All these feeds are in Atom 1.0 format, which all modern feed readers can understand.
EITHER Go to the Mass page or the About Today page. In your browser's address bar you will see a feed icon next to the page address. Click on it, and your browser will give you some options for which feed to use and how to use it. Other tools such as feed readers and syndication sites may also be able to "auto-discover" the Universalis feeds if you give them the page address to look at.
OR you can get the address of the feed you want like this:
When you visit our site and ask our server for a page (or a banner or a feed), there are two things it is impossible for our server to know all by itself. One is the day on which you visited the site, because that depends on where you are. At 10.30am GMT on Thursday at Greenwich it can be half past midnight on Friday on Christmas Island but still only half an hour before midnight on Wednesday on Midway Island. When you make an ordinary visit to one of our normal web pages, the page contains a little Javascript code which will ask your computer “What is the real time where you are?” and adjust the page accordingly. But this little piece of extra intelligence can’t be done for banners or for RSS feeds, and if you are far away from GMT then you need to specify the time zone explicitly as part of the address you use for the banner or feed.
The other thing our site doesn’t know is where you are liturgically. Which region is it? Which country? Which diocese? Everyone’s calendar is subtly different, and sometimes more than subtly. For instance, in parts of the Middle East Sundays are celebrated on Friday as well as on Sunday. Again, when you’re just visiting the site for yourself, you only have to follow the “Settings” or “Current calendar” link once, and after that your computer will remember the setting; but with banners and feeds, this doesn’t happen.
You can specify both the time zone and the calendar as part of the web address or URL, so that people are seeing what you expect them to see. For example, the image location for a Universalis banner using Eastern Standard Time and the USA "Ascension on Sunday" calendar would be:
http://universalis.com/-0500/USA.Sunday/banner.gif
See How to Link to Us for more details of this extra information and how it should be formatted.
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