What are RSS news feeds?

RSS (most commonly expanded as "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video. They are often called "news feeds." South Bay Bible Fellowship publishes content (Pastor Tim's Blog and Pastor Tim's Podcast) in a news feed. When you subscribe to a news feed, you can receive that content as soon as it's published, without the need to visit the our website. If you subscribe to our Podcast feed, for instance, the sermon will automatically be sent to you on a weekly basis. Subscribing to a news feed is free.

 Is it like email?

News feeds are similar in many ways to email. You can subscribe to the content you want and have it sent directly to you. However, news feeds have several advantages over email. You don't have to provide any personal information (like an email address) when you subscribe to a news feed, and you don't have to go through a complicated process to unsubscribe from a feed - unsubscribing is just a matter of deleting that feed.

 How do I read a news feed?

To receive a news feed such as our Podcast, you'll need to use a program that can receive and read feeds. Some email programs have the ability to read feeds built-in, and there are programs available to add feed-reading capability to other email programs like Outlook. However, many people use programs called feed readers to manage and read their feed subscriptions. There are many feed readers available for all computer platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.), and many of them are free. Many browsers have feed subscription built right in - when you visit a feed page it automatically provides methods of subscribing to the feed - such as Live Bookmarks or Bloglines. One of the more popular free feed readers is Google Reader - which is browser based; there are many others available to try out, as a Google search will reveal. iTunes has a very easy to use interface for Podcast feeds.

 So how do I subscribe to a South Bay Bible Fellowship feed?

• Set up a program to read feeds (see "How do I read a news feed?" above for details on doing this).
• Each feed reader program has its own way of subscribing to a feed, so follow the instructions for whichever program you're using. The URL's for the SBBF feeds are:
  • The Podcast feed:
    http://feeds.feedburner.com/SouthBayBibleFellowship
  • Pastor Tim's blog:
    http://www.southbaybiblefellowship.org/blog/7/feed

That's it! Once you've subscribed to your feed, you will receive new content automatically whenever it is posted.