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RSS

What is RSS?

RSS is a file format that stands for (among other things), Rich Site Summary. Exactly what it is somewhat complicated, but the bottom line is that with RSS bookmarks you can find out when ratings have been posted at your school, or for your favorite professors. RSS bookmarks in combination with RSS Feed Readers you can find out this information without having to visit the site.

We have pages that display content (information displayed on the web pages of interest to different communities of users) according to RSS file format, instead of the usual HTML/XHTML formats.

Here are some pages you can learn more about RSS from -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_disambiguation

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html

RSS on RMP

To create an RSS bookmark for your school, you must enter part or all of your school's name into the search bar found at the top of RMP.

For the purposes of demonstration we will be using "Towson University".

If you wish to know when ratings have been posted for a particular professor, you first go to his school's listing, and find his name on the page:

After the page has loaded, click on the RSS button ( ) that shares a row with the school or professor whose ratings you wish to subscribe to.

When you click the orange button, popup box will be displayed.

As you can see, the box contains a URL. This is the link you will need to "subscribe" to your school's or professor's ratings. Some browsers come equipped to handle these link without additional software. To find out if your browser is one of them, copy and paste the URL into your browser's Address bar, and click "Go".

http://feed.RateMyProfessors.com/rssSchoolTeachersRating.jsp?sid=1025

RSS Feed Readers

If the page you are shown looks like the one above, you are going to need a RSS Feed Reader in order to take advantage of the RSS capability. There are several free ones available on the net. Here are a few of the ones that we found.:

Feedreader: http://www.feedreader.com/ -

Sage (can only be used with Mozilla Firefox): https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/77/

Taskable: http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/Taskable_RSS/taskablerss.html

RSSReader: http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/RssReader/RssReader.html

Custom XML Reader 1.0: http://www.tucows.com/preview/501293

FeedExpress: http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/FeedExpress/feedexpress.html

GoogleReader: http://www.google.com/reader

Yahoo: http://my.yahoo.com/s/about/rss/

Other opinions about various feed readers can be found here. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061101054542AA43MLe

NOTE: We do not endorse these products or services, please use at your own risk.

The process for turning the URL found in the popup box into something you can use (a process that is usually called "subscribing") varies from one reader to the next. Therefore you should follow the instructions that come with the reader. Click here for more details on RSS for RMP