Hi Matt and other openVPMS users,

RSS feeds are a really useful way to keep in touch with sites (such as OpenVPMS.org) which have content which is regularly updated. It enables you to see those changes and then navigate to them if they interest you.

Most browsers will display an RSS icon in the address bar on pages which have a feed and there are also RSS icons around the site which link to the feeds for that page. If you click on those links your browser will take you to the feed for that page or offer you the oppurtunity to add a feed to your feed reader.

There are many different feed readers and ways in which you can use the feed:

• Many mail clients such as thunderbird, outlook and apple mail can be used to read news feeds. You can then see the feed when you are reading your email. Web based email services such as yahoo mail and I think google mail also offer the same service.
• If you have iGoogle or My Yahoo as your home page you can add feeds to them and view them whenever you open that page.
• firefox uses live bookmarks- you can a bookmark for the feed and when you look at the bookmark you see a description of each feed item.
• There are specific news or blog readers such as google reader

There are many other ways to use the feeds. It's just a matter of working out how to best make use of them for your own situation.

At the moment on OpenVPMS there are feeds for people's blogs, the forums, the home page, and (for members of the community groups) there are also rss feeds for individual community groups (shared resources, investigation module and enhanced scheduling). Most of these feeds can be found on the sitemap. The group feeds can be found on the individual groups home page- just follow the links from the community page

As an example, I have a feed added to Apple mail (my mail client) for the front page and for the users forum. Whenever I check my email the feeds are there under the mail messages and can be read like an email and then I can follow the link to visit the page on the site.

I also use google reader and have some feeds from the site added there. I also have feeds from sites other than google there and check google reader less frequently than email but I find it quite useful. It is easy to use and can be accessed anywhere.

There are many ways to use rss feeds so perhaps other users could indicate how they use rss feeds to help others make use of this very handy resource.