RSS Syndication at Lula

Lula offers RSS feeds for events, news and podcasts that we publish.

If you’re already familiar with RSS [aka syndication], you’ll find the feeds in the sidebar at the right.

If you aren’t, let us recommend that you learn a bit about it.

Syndication is a way to stay current with websites that you like, without having to spend enormous amounts of time surfing. For the Lula.ca site, for example, with Syndication, you don’t need to visit the site to see if new information has been added since your last visit. Instead, you can stay up to date, receiving notifications as soon as new events, podcasts or news is added to the site. If there’s nothing new, you’ll know, and you’ll save the time you’d spend going to check.

If this only worked for Lula, it wouldn’t be so useful, but literally millions of websites offer syndicated feeds, including the news sites that you probably visit already. By using syndication, you can quickly see summaries of all the new items on all the sites that you like, from one place, quickly and easily.

How Do I Use Syndication?

To do this, you need to use a piece of software called a news reader, or a news aggregator. There are many excellent newsreaders available for Windows, Mac or Linux. If you use OS X, you already have a newsreader built in to all recent versions of Safari, the default browser. If you use Windows, you can use RssReader. Many other options exist, including an add-on for the free Firefox browser called, oddly Firefox Newsreader.

Once you have the software downloaded and installed, you need to find the RSS or XML or Atom feeds for the sites you like. Ours are over there on the right. Often a search inside a site for ‘RSS’ or ‘syndication’ will allow you to quickly find the link that you need.

Once you’ve found it, drag the link into the open window of your newsreader. Most newsreaders will then download the information from the site, and create an item in a menu or list that you can click on to display the stories that are part of that feed.

From then on, whenever you want to find out what stories are current or new on a site you like, you only need to open your newsreader, find the site you’re interested in, and click on it. In most newsreaders, when you find a story you like, you can either read it in the newsreader, or click on a link provide to view the page for the story in a browser.