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RSS on your website

You can use RSS (really simple syndication) to put headlines from this site onto your own website, blog, newsreader etc.

Below are two styles of the RSS feed to choose from plus instructions on how to add the RSS feed to your website.

RSS feed styles

A. Purple

B. Plain

How to add the RSS feed to your website

1. Paste this code into the <body> section of your XHTML page:

2. Decide which RSS feed style you would like (purple or plain - see examples above) and paste the corresponding CSS styles into the <head> section of your XHTML page:

A. Purple:

B. Plain:

Optional features

There are a couple of options that you can customise as a user of this service, by editing the code that you add in step 1 (above):

  1. Number of news items - You can change "n=3" to a number between 1 and 15, to alter the number of news items displayed on your site.
  2. Description - You can change "showdescription=0" to "showdescription=1" to display the longer descriptive text associated with each news item. This is usually the first couple of sentences of the item, so will have a significant effect on the size of the embedded feed on your site.

A note about character sets

The RSS feed returns the news items in the "UTF-8" character set (strictly, this is the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set). To ensure that all characters in the feed render correctly, your page must also use the "UTF-8" character set, otherwise some characters may render incorrectly or be replaced with a "?" by users' browsers. This is the default character set for many platforms, so you probably won't need to worry about it. However, if you need to set the character set explicitly, you can do so by inserting the following line into the <head> section of your document:

The use of different character sets can represent a complex challenge for web development and is explained in more detail by the World Wide Web Consortium.