RSS What is it?
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It's essentially a way of keeping track of the most recent articles from your favorite sources. Now you may be asking "What does this have to do with Grendel's Cave?" and what a great questions that is. Grendel Slayers has been devoted to bringing you the most up-to-date news on GC for a very long time now. We output RSS feed in our last version, and this version is no different with the exception that we have more, and better RSS feeds than ever before.
How do I use RSS?
RSS is becoming more and more common place every day. Hit any major news site and you'll find that they're using RSS already. With the popularity of RSS sky-rocketing every day, most major web browsers support it. I personally use Firefox as my web browser and would suggest you do the same, for a number of reasons. For the sake of this article I will explain how RSS integrates with Firefox. If you use another browser, the tasks should be fairly similar to each other.
As of this writing Firefox is at version 2.0.0.1 and Internet Explorer is at version 7 something, but only for Window's XP users and above. Both support RSS, version 6 of IE does not, so if you wish to use RSS and are on Windows 2000 or earlier you'll almost certainly need Firefox or some other sort of RSS Aggregator. You can obtain Firefox here. Firefox is a product of the Mozilla Foundation, who puts out Thunderbird as well. Thunderbird is an email client that handles RSS equally as well (although I'll not go into detail on how to set that up). I have no knowledge of Outlook or whether it handles RSS or not.
Step 1: Find a page that has RSS support
There are many pages inside of Grendel Slayers that have RSS support. Any page with often updating content is a likely candidate. Blogs, News, and Tactics are all likely candidates. For this example we'll be using Beowulf's Blog as that would be the most relevant information for GC in general at any given moment.
Step 2: Subscribing
There are a couple different way to subscribe to a feed. The most common would be to find the RSS icon on the page. It looks like a small orange square with radio waves in it. The second, and more convenient way would be via the URL bar. If you're on a page that has RSS support then an icon that denotes that will appear in your URL bar. By simply clicking either of these icons you will be brought to a new page that contains the RSS feed related to the page you were just on.
Once on the RSS feed's page itself you'll be presented with a number of options. The first is to select the program you wish to use for your RSS reader. For the sake of this tutorial, select "Live Bookmarks". Uncheck "Always use Live Bookmarks to subscribe to feeds". This would make Live Bookmarks the default, and you may find another product that you prefer as you become more RSS savvy.
Click Subscribe Now
A dialog box will appear; select the defaults.
Directly below your URL bar, you should now see "Beowulf's blog". This is an auto-updating link to all of Beowulf's blog posts now. Your browser should automatically check to see if anything new has been written by Beowulf. If you click this link, a drop down menu will appear that shows all of the Titles of Beowulf's blog posts. Click on any title and it'll take you directly to that post.
Welcome to the world of RSS.