I posted the following to a post-doc group page and thought it might be useful to be duplicated here:
RSS feeds provide a significant resource in keeping track of regularly updated information on the web. Most commonly, RSS feeds are used as a way of “subscribing” to news sources and blogs. Any time you see the RSS logo (orange box with radar or radio signal inside) , you have a site that can be subscribed to.
Basically, an RSS feed is just a website that is regularly updated by the content provider. It’s standard format is XML. As a user, you choose a particular “feed-reeder” to subscribe to these feeds. These can be local software clients, such as Outlook or Thunderbird. They can also be online like a webmail client. The most popular online feed readers are Google Reader and Bloglines.
Once you have decided on one of these you simply begin subscribing through that client. That can mean copy and pasting the link to the RSS feed (e.g., right click on the rss logo to copy link). Also, current browsers such as Firefox and IE7 provide an icon on or near the address bar that you can click to subscribe.
The reason I brought all this up was to suggest that RSS feeds might be used to subscribe to job postings. I haven’t checked out the sites that were brought up at the meeting, but as an example you can go to NatureJobs and perform a search. On the search results pages, one of the options in the menu to the left is “Search Results RSS Feed”. This is a custom designed link that you can use to subscribe to this search. Anytime new postings fit your search they will appear on this feed and will show up in your feed reader, once subscribed. On these other sites you might look around for the RSS logo on search results pages as this is becoming more common.
I hope this provides some helpful information. Feel free to ask some questions if you are interested in knowing more.
UPDATE: I should also mention that there are ways to create a feed on pages that don’t offer feeds for their content. The technique is called HTML scraping. If anyone is interested, I can post some details. The reason I mention this is that I noticed that the job search sites listed in our group do not offer RSS feeds for their search results and I wanted you all to know that there are ways around this. (e.g., FeedYes)
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