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The RSS Portlet allows you to subscribe to "feeds" from a source that will create a list of links to content you may find of interest. You must specify the "URL" address to the content provider in a special software tool called an "aggregator". The RSS portlet that you can add to your portal pages is just such an aggregator.
Adding and configuring RSS portlets on your page
Add the "RSS Newsfeeds and Blogs" portlet to a location you choose by clicking the "Add or Delete Portlets" link on your "My Page" tab. If this is your first time adding a portlet, follow the directions for adding a portlet on the Call Center portal help pages.
When the RSS portlet is first placed on your page it will have no content. To add content of your choosing, click the "personalize" link (called "customize" on some portlets) at the upper right of the portlet and you will see the following window.
You must add a valid URL to allow the portlet to access to the source of the RSS syndication, usually indicated on a website with the RSS  tag or the XML  tag. In this example, the source is a New York Times news feed with the URL "http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Movies.xml".
The portlet above has been congigured to display 5 rows of headline links, and the title has been changed to read "NY Times Movies". If you choose to click the "yes" radio button next to the dialog box question "Display description for each headline?", you will also see a few lines of discription beneath each link.
Clicking the "OK" button will put your portal with the appropriate title and links on your page. In this case the NY Times Movies portal looks like the image below.
You can add as many RSS portlets as you like, each with different URL links and appropriate titles. Some district faculty are publishing their own RSS newsfeeds with links to class information. Their students can then subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date about the specifics of the class, with links that change as needed to show the very latest content. Students will eventually have this RSS capability on their own Foothill or De Anza portal pages.
Further information about RSS and it's use
Wikipedia provides the following definition for RSS:
RSS is the acronym of a family of web feed formats. Specifically, it is of XML dialects for Web syndication used by (among other things) news websites and weblogs. The abbreviation is used to refer to the following standards:
- Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
- RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
- Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Web feeds in general allow Internet users to subscribe to websites; these are typically sites that change or add content regularly. To use this technology, site owners create or obtain specialized software (such as a content management system) which, in the machine-readable XML format, presents new articles in a list, giving a line or two of each article and a link to the full article or post. Unlike subscriptions to many printed newspapers and magazines, most RSS subscriptions are free.
Web feeds in general provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data. RSS in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator.
You can learn more about RSS on the Wikipedia site.
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