Huh? RSS?

RSS Feeds are special pages that you can use to get the latest news from sites that have them. There are also quite some blog sites that have it. And: The Sims Zone provides feeds too now! These pages are not meant to be shown in your web browser, but you should use an "aggregator", a program which can read the files and show the latest headlines as you wish. Some programs are FeedDemon, FeedReader, and Trillian Pro (with the News plugin, not free) on Windows, NetNewsWire (Macintosh), KNewsTicker (Linux) or AmphetaDesk (Windows, Mac, Linux). Those who browse with Mozilla or FireFox can install an extension to use the RSS feeds.

When you add one of our feeds to the program of your choice, you can always stay updated with the latest Sim news, without having to visit our site. You can also add feeds from many other sites to the program, so you have one program which keeps you up-to-date with all the latest news. You'll get the title and the first bit of the news items. Clicking a link or the title will take you to the complete post.

So how does it work?

To start using our RSS feeds, you first need to install an aggregator (reader). Besides the ones listed above, you can find a nice list of aggregators at the following links:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/directory/5/aggregators

http://blogspace.com/rss/readers

Popular programs are the ones we listed in the first paragraph. We recommend trying some programs for your platform. Most of them (all of the ones we listed) are free (except Trillian), but there are also some that you have to pay for. Just install some programs, try them, and keep the ones you like installed. Uninstall the ones you don't like. There are many other programs (or plugins for programs) available that can read RSS feeds, but there are too many to list.

Once you installed your favourite reader, you have to add our feed. We have three feeds at the moment: News, Community News and Files. Since it's different for each program, you have to look in the help files of the program you use to find out how to add a new feed. Often it's just in the File menu, then Add Feed (or similar).

These are the urls for The Sims Zone's RSS feeds (note that these are NOT meant to be viewed by your web browser):

News: http://www.thesimszone.co.uk/rss/news.rss (Validate) Community News: http://www.thesimszone.co.uk/rss/cnews.rss (Validate) Files: http://www.thesimszone.co.uk/rss/files.rss (Validate)

If you use Trillian Pro, you need to enter the following details:

• News:
  
  • Server: www.thesimszone.co.uk
    
  • Location: rss/news.rss
• Community News:
  
  • Server: www.thesimszone.co.uk
  • Location: rss/cnews.rss
• Files:
  
  • Server: www.thesimszone.co.uk
  • Location: rss/files.rss

Once you entered the details, your reader will start fetching the news from The Sims Zone. The feeds are update live, so you're always completely up-to-date. Most readers allow you to set how often it should update. Please do not set this lower than once in 15 minutes, as every time it has to update it costs us a bit of bandwidth. Note that you have to be connected to the internet to be able to get new headlines.

What does it cost?

Besides some space on your hard drive for the program, we offer this service for free. You might have to pay a bit for the reader you use, depending on which one you choose. Most are free though, so it doesn't have to cost you a single penny. However, it does cost us a bit and if too many people update their feeds every minute it costs us a lot of bandwidth. Since that's limited, we ask you to set up your program to download new headlines no more than once in 15 minutes (preferrably 30).

Where can I get more?

Some programs include several popular feeds which you can enable in a few clicks. However, there are too many feeds to list in one program. One of the biggest index of feeds is Syndic8. You can find our feeds there too with Feed IDs 34360 (News), 34361 (Community News) and 89681 (Files). Visit Syndic8 to check if your favourite news source has an RSS feed for you. Another nice site where you can find a lot of feeds is NewsIsFree.

If you ever see a site with one of these icons:

or sites with referenes to RDF, RSS or Syndicate (or anything similar), it's likely they have RSS feeds available.

More info about RSS can be found at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech. It has a lot of info, including lists of aggregators, the specifications of RSS (so you can create your own files), tutorials, and many other things.

If you want to validate RSS feeds, to make sure they'll work properly, visit http://feedvalidator.org. Want to make sure our feeds are valid? Click to validate our News Feed, our Community News Feed and our Files Feed.

If you ever find a bug in one of our feeds, E-mail ChEeTaH. You can do the same if you have any questions about these feeds, or how to use them. Any comments are appreciated.

We hope you find the feeds useful, and that they make it easier for you to stay up-to-date with the latest news.