Using RSS Feeds To Help Find The Used Car That Meets Your Needs
What is RSS?
RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a quick way to find out the latest information from your favourite websites. Carsite is offering RSS feeds (also known as ‘site feeds’, or ‘Atom feeds’) on our search results pages, so that you can quickly find out when new cars are added to our system that match your search criteria.
What’s in Carsite’s feeds?
When you search for a quality used car on Carsite, an RSS feed is made available for the search results. Subscribing to that feed enables you to keep track of the latest cars as they are added to our system. more…
RSS feeds are intended to be a quick summary of new information on a site, with a link through to the full article. As Carsite provides such detailed information about our cars, we have just included in each entry the main photo, current price, time to end of auction (or Buy It Now), and the car summary. To see more photos, the fitted equipment list, HPI history check and RAC Inspection reports, click through to the listing page for that car, where you can also bid on or buy the car.
Feed Readers
To take advantage of RSS you will need a feed reader (or news aggregator) - software that keeps abreast of information from sites in which you’re interested, and allows you to see at a glance what’s new.
Telling your feed reader to watch a feed is called subscribing to that feed (see below for details). For most feeds this is free, and doesn’t require telling the site anything about yourself.
There are three main types of feed reader:
Browsers more…
Most modern browsers support RSS to some extent. This includes Internet Explorer 7 (Windows XP and Vista only), Safari (Mac OSX only), Firefox and Opera (both available for Windows, OSX or Linux). Opera is also available for some mobile phones and other handheld devices.
If you’re still using Internet Explorer 6 or earlier, you should be able to upgrade to IE7 if you’re running Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Feeds Plus is an enhancement to IE7’s RSS support.
Flock is a variant of the Firefox browser, which has extended RSS support.
Desktop Feed Readers more…
Another type of feed reader is a desktop application dedicated to pulling together and organising many news sources. These are usually more powerful – and correspondingly more complex – than the basic RSS support currently provided by browsers. For example, they can usually notify you immediately when feeds are updated.
Some of these products come with a selection of news sources pre-subscribed, or offer subscriptions to various packages of feeds by subject.
Here is a short list of free desktop readers for Windows (all of which require the Microsoft .net Runtime):
- JetBrains Omea Reader (integrates well with Firefox)
- RSS Reader
- RSS Bandit
Web-based Readers more…
As you will generally come across feeds while browing the web, it may seem natural to use a web-based feed reader. This has the additional advantage that you can check your feeds from any computer.
Some popular web-based readers are:
As with desktop readers, most web-based services offer useful packages of predefined feeds.
How to Subscribe to Carsite’s RSS feeds
There are two different ways to find an RSS feed on a web page. Most sites display the RSS icon (
) somewhere on the page. In an RSS-aware browser the icon will also appear next to the page’s address or, in the case of IE7, on the toolbar. (In Safari the address bar icon looks like this:
)
How you subscribe depends on which browser you’re using:
I am Using Internet Explorer 7 more…
To add the feed to your browser’s Feed List
Click the RSS icon in the toolbar, then click on ‘Subscribe to this feed’in the yellow area at the top of the page.
To add the feed to your web-based reader
Click the RSS icon on the page and choose the name of your feed reader from the Subscribe Options list.
To add the feed to your desktop reader
Right-click the RSS icon on the page and choose on ‘Copy Shortcut’. Paste the feed URL into the appropriate place in your feed reader.
I am Using Internet Explorer 6 more…
To add the feed to your web-based reader
Click the RSS icon on the page and choose the name of your feed reader from the Subscribe Options list.
To add the feed to your desktop reader
Right-click the RSS icon on the page and choose on ‘Copy Shortcut’. Paste the feed URL into the appropriate place in your feed reader.
(IE6 has no built-in RSS support.)
I am using Firefox more…
To add the feed to your browser’s Live Bookmarks
Click the RSS icon in the address bar and choose ‘Live Bookmarks’ from the list of options.
To add the feed to your web-based reader
Click the RSS icon on the page and choose the name of your feed reader.
To add the feed to your desktop reader
Click the RSS icon on the address bar, select ‘Choose Application’ and navigate to your feed reader program.
I am using Safari more…
Please follow these helpful instructions.
I am using Opera more…
To add the feed to your browser’s Feed List
Click the RSS icon in the address bar, then click 'Yes' in the dialog box that appears.
To add the feed to your web-based reader
Click the RSS icon on the page and choose the name of your feed reader from the Subscribe Options list.
To add the feed to your desktop reader
Right-click the RSS icon on the page and choose on ‘Copy Shortcut’. Paste the feed URL into the appropriate place in your feed reader.
You can subscribe to as many feeds as you like, and so be sure not to miss the car of your dreams!