Support Report:The UA RSS Feed
By James Cigler
Yes that’s right, we’ve stepped firmly into circa 1999 web technology! One small step for UA, one giant...uh, you get the picture.
All kidding aside, we have added an RSS feed for the main Universal Audio web site, which will be used to broadcast out important updates like new software releases, promotions, or anything that we want to get out to you, the user, right away.
Rather than going to a web site and loading it to see what's new, RSS delivers it to you.
So what is an RSS feed, you might be asking? Well, it’s only the single greatest thing on the internet (in my opinion anyway!). RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is a method of syndicating a web site’s content in a standard format. The general concept is that rather than going to a web site and loading it to see what’s new, RSS “delivers” it to you, the user. This becomes really powerful when you have RSS feeds from many different web sites. For example, I have over 200 RSS feeds that I subscribe too, many of which are not updated every day. For me to load up 200 bookmarks just to see what’s new would take hours, possibly even the whole day; whereas with RSS feeds I am able to run through everything that’s new in less than an hour while I’m enjoying my morning coffee.
The great part about RSS feeds becoming so popular is that you no longer have to search out a feed reader application, or aggregator as they are known, in order to make use of RSS feeds. If you are using a current version of Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer, you already have an RSS aggregator! Even some email applications like Thunderbird or the latest Yahoo! email client have built-in aggregators. Explaining all these in details is beyond the scope of this article, so I’ll simply demonstrate the process in Firefox. The others are very similar, if not virtually the same.
You can either manually enter in our RSS feed URL into your web browser, or simply navigate to our web site and see the RSS feed indicator on the far right side of the address bar.
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You have no doubt seen this before. It is an indication that there is an RSS feed available for this particular web site. By simply clicking this icon, you can add the RSS feed to your bookmarks menu, where you can access the feed at any time.
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That’s it! You are now subscribed to the Universal Audio RSS feed.
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If you really catch the RSS feed bug, you’ll find that managing many feeds in your browser like this can be less than ideal. In that case, I would recommend a dedicated RSS aggregator. Google Reader is my preference, as it’s both cross-platform and web-based, so it’s accessible from anywhere. However, there are many other great offerings, both for free as well as for a few bucks.