News feeds

News feeds from Colchester Borough Council

We are starting to add RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to our website to provide an easy way for you to keep updated automatically on the latest news from Colchester Borough Council.  This currently only applies to news releases, but we hope to extend this service in the futre.

Instead of you having to go to the Council's latest news page within the website to see if new content is available, you can use RSS feeds to tell you every time there is something new.

RSS takes the hassle out of staying up-to-date, by showing you the very latest information that you are interested in.

What are News Feeds?

News feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines in one place, as soon as it's published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.

Feeds are also known as RSS. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people plump for 'Really Simple Syndication'. In essence, the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people.

How do you start using News Feeds

In general you need to get hold of a program called a News Reader. This displays RSS information feeds from your chosen websites on your computer. All you then have to do is choose which RSS feeds you want.

There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer.

Some examples of news readers are:-

News Readers

Windows
Newz Crawler
FeedDemon
Awasu

Mac OS X
Newsfire
NetNewsWire

Web
Bloglines
FeedZilla
NewsGator
Microsoft Live
My Yahoo!

Browser
Mozilla Firefox

Other News Readers (GOOGLE)

Colchester Borough Council is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Alternatively, some web browsers, including Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari, automatically check for feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one, which can make subscribing to feeds much easier. For more details on these, please check their websites.

When are the feeds updated?

We update the RSS News Feed as soon as new relevant information is posted on our website.  As we update our site the feed is updated automatically, and your feed reader will display the headlines with links to the full news stories.

Can I publish Colchester Borough Council RSS feeds on my own web pages?

You can use the feed free for personal or non-commercial use to display Colchester Borough Council news feeds on your own site using RSS.

You can use Colchester Borough Council RSS feeds as part of a website, however, we do require that attribution is used when Colchester Borough Council News content appears. The attribution text should read "Latest news from www.colchester.gov.uk". You may not use the Colchester Borough Council logo.

If you would like to use our feed in a web page, we are interested to hear from you.  Please tell us where the page is and what you want to do with it by filling in our website on-line form.