What is RSS?

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is often described as a "feed," which one subscribes to. RSS Feeds provide content from a website as the content is published. RSS Feeds are particularly popular to deliver frequently updated content such as news articles.

Why should I use RSS?

Using RSS feeds can save you a lot of time on a daily basis. Instead of visiting each website you want to stay up to date with, you can aggregate content from several sources to one place and view them quickly as content becomes available.

How to get RSS feeds available on the ITS website

Information Technology Services (ITS) provides RSS feeds for news articles as well as a customizable feed for alerts.

ITS News RSS

The URL for the ITS News RSS feed is: https://its.uiowa.edu/news/feed

ITS Alerts RSS

The default URL for the ITS Alerts and Outages RSS feed is: https://its.uiowa.edu/alerts/feed

The ITS Alerts RSS feeds accepts optional parameters to filter alert content. One can filter alerts to specific severities, types, services and/or buildings. 

ITS provides an Alerts RSS Generator to allow users to easily customize the alerts feed url specific to one's needs. This is the recommended way to construct a custom feed for alerts as the parameter ID numbers aren't well known.

For example, one could use the generator to create a custom feed to just show both major and normal outage alerts related to UI Wireless within the University Capitol Centre (UCC). The result URL would be: https://its.uiowa.edu/alerts/feed/all/29/209/7158

Viewing RSS Content

Once you have a valid RSS URL, you can "consume" or view the feed by adding the URL to an RSS reader or aggregator.

Some popular RSS readers/aggregators include:

​Note: ITS does not provide support for any of the above RSS readers/aggregators.

Article number: 
104758
Last updated: 
March 22, 2023