The Power of RSS

Reclaim Your Reading Time: Centralise Your Amateur Radio Articles

QRPer articles shown in the Feedly app

Have you ever come across an interesting website article on amateur radio and thought: “I’d like to know when they post new articles…”?

This happened to me recently when I came across the community website QRPer*. An interesting website that discussed aspects about and related to low power amateur radio topics.

Well, the good need is that we CAN receive automatic website article updates! We simply subscribe to a website’s “feed” to get them.

RSS Syndication

For those unaware of the technology, RSS syndication has been around since 1999. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) refers to the process of distributing website content, like blog posts or news updates, in a standardised format. RSS allows us to subscribe to feeds (websites, news sites, social media, etc.) and receive automatic updates in our chosen RSS reader. RSS provides updates to us automatically, instead of requiring us to visit a website periodically to check for new uploads.

Plus, unlike printed magazines, RSS feeds offer instant updates and are more environmentally friendly.

We manage our selection of RSS feeds using a smartphone/tablet/PC app, and when we’re on a website that we might like to subscribe to, we can see if the website supports RSS by looking for the following logo:

As for app recommendations to manage our growing collection of RSS feeds, Feedly (https://feedly.com/news-reader – see image) is a free app you might like to try; there are many other apps, too.

FPARC’s RSS Feed

The Fort Purbrook Amateur Radio Club website supports RSS feeds, too. Here are just a small list of our feeds:

• The entire website feed: https://fparc.uk/feed/
• Just the articles: https://fparc.uk/category/articles/feed/
• Just the events: https://fparc.uk/category/events/feed/
• … and if you want to be really fancy, any URL from the FPARC website can become a feed by simply appending feed=rss2 to the URL. Example: here’s an RSS feed of all GB1PF special events posted to our website: https://fparc.uk/category/events/special-events/?feed=rss2&fparcf=all&s=gb1pf 

Examples of FPARC’s Website Feed in the Feedly App

* “Connecting an international community through low-power field radio adventures.”

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