Posts Tagged ‘Tutorial’

How to use RSS with CouchSurfing groups

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

RSS feeds have made their way to CouchSurfing! Your group posts can now be viewed by RSS subscription. The RSS links are at the bottom of every public group page, and are also available in your Communication Settings page.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to use the feeds for easy management of group posts. There are two video tutorials at the bottom of this post if your Internet connection is fast enough.

RSS can be found on your Group Communication Settings page, or at the bottom of every group page. (you can click the picture below to take you to the page on the site)

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Group Communication Settings

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Individual Group Pages

To get the RSS feed, click on the RSS Icon image next to each group. This will take you to an RSS feed in your browser.

It may look different than the one below depending on whether you use Internet Explorer, Firefox or a different internet browser, but they all work in a similar way.

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You have a lot of choices when it comes to managing RSS feeds!

If you select “live bookmarks” then a button will usually appear at the top of your internet browser for the group and you can see the new group post titles. To read the posts, just click on the title and it will take you to the CouchSurfing site to see the entire discussion thread.

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Or you may want to set it up that your group RSS posts go through to a separate page on the internet, usually called a “reader”.

A popular option is “igoogle”, as shown in the examples below.

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If you use a different RSS service that is not listed, you need to copy and paste the address out of the RSS feed page into your reader.

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Copy

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Paste

Those are the basics. If you have a fast Internet connection, the videos below can help show you more about what RSS is, and how it works.

Videos

If you are unfamiliar with RSS feeds, here is a short video in plain English describing what they are and how they work.

Here is a more detailed example of how to use RSS feeds with CouchSurfing.

The example uses Google’s iGoogle reader, but the process is similar for any RSS feed reader.