RSS functionality is available to pulver.Communicator users via an intuitive tab interface.

Our open-source aggregator supports RSS1, RSS2, and Atom formats. And using the tools provided you can easily add, rename, and delete feeds from Communicator's RSS reader.

What is RSS?
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The simplest way of describing the increasingly-popular RSS (which means either Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on your resource) is as a way to publish the "headlines" of a website's content, headlines which are hyperlinked to underlying content. Users of RSS aggregators – programs designed to display the links offered by RSS providers – subscribe to the feeds that are of interest to them, and these feeds are updated by the providers at their discretion. Effectively, RSS readers provides a tool with which users can configure their own on-line "newspaper", from which they can scan the headlines and subsequently read the "articles" that catch their eye.

Using an RSS Reader – such as the one provided by pulver.Communicator – you can quickly scan "headlines" from literally hundreds of websites in a very short space of time. And with an aggregator you need not waste time waiting for pages to load, navigating through annoying advertisements and graphics, or sifting through stale content.

RSS Reader Layout and Navigation
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When the RSS tab is clicked the pulver.Communicator window opens to fill the entire screen, the reason for which will shortly become evident.

The pulver.Communicator RSS Reader is divided into three sections: Feeds, Links, and Content.

The Feeds section presents the RSS feeds to which you are subscribed. Each time you click on a configured feed the articles offered by that feed populate the Links section, and then once a particular link is selected its website content is displayed in the Content section. It is because the Content section presents the link content as it is presented on the web that pulver.Communicator opens to fill your entire screen when the RSS tab is accessed.

Subscribing to a Feed
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A great many websites now offer RSS feeds, though it cannot yet be considered commonplace. And standardization of RSS offering is only in the early stages, so determining which sites offer RSS feeds can take some time and effort. Typically, a site offering an RSS feed will offer a link or click-through graphic – often a small orange box with 'XML' in capital block white letters – which will either reveal the feed URL or display an RSS feed page.

Locate the feed URL for the site to which you want to subscribe, or if your selected site offers an RSS feed page note the URL from your browser's Address line.

Note: Feed URLs typically carry the protocol prefix 'feed', while RSS feed pages carry the protocol prefix 'http'.

From the RSS tab, right-click anywhere in the Feeds section to reveal the context menu.

Click Subscribe to a new feed.... The Subscribe to a new feed dialog will display.

Enter the feed URL into dialog field, and change the 'feed' prefix to 'http'. If your selected site presented an RSS feed page instead of a feed URL, type or copy the URL for that page into the field.
Click OK. The newly-subscribed feed will display in the Feeds section.

Renaming a Feed
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When a feed is first configured to the Feeds section it is presented with its default name, however Communicator users can easily rename the feed to fit their preference.

Highlight the feed that is to be renamed by clicking on it one time.
Invoke the right-click menu command Rename....

The name field will activate.

Note: Another way to activate a feed name is to click on it again once it has already been highlighted (not a double-click per se, but a click-and-then-another-click).

Type the new name for the feed into the activated field.
Click the Enter key or move and click the cursor to any different location to deactivate the display name field and complete the renaming.