The Forum will be sending members Cuttings, an email newsletter-digest to members, starting in the Autumn of 2008. For good practical reasons, this is, however, a selection of recent Forum posts and intended as a supplement to this website itself; and it will be appearing monthly.
Should you wish to stay more up to date with Forum matters, our new email update service might be of interest to you. Subscribers to this (free) service will receive a daily email of new content on the site. We’ve tried to set it up to be as user-friendly as possible: via SUBSCRIBE TO DAILY EMAIL UPDATES – in the bottom right-hand corner, under all the links.
Drowning in newsletters? Tired of cluttered email boxes? We can, happily, offer an alternative. Spare yourself any exacerbation of all these agonies by subscribing to an “RSS feed” for the Forum’s site. There are two ways of doing this. Right at the bottom of the right-hand column, under “meta,” you will see two kinds of feed. ENTRIES RSS is for new Forum posts – that is, new items, that also appear on the right-hand side in “Recently on the Forum…” It may be the most useful way of receiving new information put up here. COMMENTS RSS should be self-explanatory; it will be more useful for following any heated discussion that might be taking place here, for instance in the Village Green.
Once you’ve set up The Feed on your computer, in your bookmarks and/or on a bookmarks toolbar, you are a mere click away from seeing if anything new has appeared on the Forum site since you last checked. Whenever we receive news of a new event or activity, before the information appears on the EVENTS page it will first be put up on the site as a post whose title starts with NEWS, NEWSFLASH, HOT OFF THE PRESS, BREAKING NEWS, or something of the sort. The existence of this update to the site will be noted immediately by your RSS feed, and it will update or refresh itself accordingly.
An RSS feed is the fastest way to stay up to the minute – indeed, up to the instant – with Forum news. It should save you time, and save you from the annoyance of going to the site only to find that nothing has appeared recently, or that too much has.
ABOUT RSS FEEDS AND HOW TO USE THEM
An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is essentially an electronic update, whenever a dynamic site – like the FMRSI – is updated. That is, once new posts appear or new comments are made on them. One of the main uses is by news sites. You’ll see RSS feeds on RTE and The Irish Times, for example. As ever, Wikipedia gives a good full definition; see also WordPress’ own reasons why RSS feeds are useful.
When you first subscribe to a feed, it’ll appear in the horizontal tool-bar at the top of your screen (Firefox and Internet Explorer both do this very similarly). You can decide where else to put it, what to call it, and indeed whether you would like to keep all your Feeds together under one sort of folder, or leave each in their own immediate entry. Click on RSS, then go into Bookmarks, thence to Organize Bookmarks, and sort out where your RSS feed will appear on your web browser window. (Depending on your computer setup, there may be other routes on setting up an RSS feed and bookmarking it – this one seems fairly cross-platform-ly reliable.)
RSS feeds enable you to see news or blog updates really fast, without going to the site, or indeed navigating away from where you are and what you’re doing. Just point your mouse at the symbol and a list of the most recent posts will appear. Clicking on any one will take you directly to it.
FMRSI 