Why RSS?

One way to get Stick Software news is to subscribe to our newsletter. If you do this, you will get an occasional email with new product announcements, product update news, and other items of interest. But the time lag between when we release a product or update and when we send out the next newsletter that mentions it can be quite large. If you want immediate notification as things happen, you want to subscribe to our RSS feed.

An RSS feed is a general mechanism for news "producers" (like Stick Software) to publish news items on the Internet. Whenever a news item is posted, "consumers" (like yourself) are notified, and you can track your unread news, read it as it comes out, forward it to others, and so forth. It does for time-sensitive content what the web does for more static content. If you use RSS, you don't have to keep refreshing a page like CNN over and over to see what is new; new items will simply appear, marked "unread", in your RSS newsreader. Since I first wrote this support page, RSS feeds have become much more common, in the form of blogs; if you use any sort of blog reader or news reader, you're probably using RSS.

Using RSS

To use RSS, the first thing you need is an RSS-compatible newsreader. On OS X, you can use Safari for this, but there are lots of other alternatives, too; I personally use Feedly, at the moment. Once you've got your RSS newsreader installed, exactly how you use it depends upon the program you have chosen; you should refer to its manual and help pages for details. But roughly, it should have some user interface that allows you to "subscribe" to a given RSS feed. You identify the RSS feed you wish to subscribe to by pasting its URL into a textfield. Once you have subscribed, the news items from that feed will appear in some sort of list or browser, and you will be able to click on them and read them.

Our RSS feed

Stick Software's RSS feed is at this URL:

http://www.sticksoftware.com/news/rss.xml

Copy and paste the text URL from here into your RSS newsreader. Alternatively, you can control-click the RSS icon below and copy the link from there if you wish:

And incidentally: when we send out a newsletter, we post an RSS news item about that, with a link to the newsletter. So if you're subscribed to our RSS feed, you don't really need to be subscribed to our newsletter; you'll hear about them anyway.