The News tool uses RSS to bring dynamic news to your site. RSS is a data format used to syndicate news on the web. It allows continuously updated content from a remote news site to appear in another web site.

To set up a site to display news, the instructor or site owner must specify a URL pointing to an RSS news feed. An RSS news feed is a specially formatted list of news articles. You can find RSS feeds by using an Internet search engine (e.g., Google or Yahoo). Sites that distribute news in RSS format are called "news feeds." The News tool is an RSS "news aggregator" (or news reader) that reads and displays content from RSS news feeds. An RSS feed can be identified by the .xml or .rss in the URL (e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Movies.xml or http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss).

In addition to news, some web sites use the RSS format for information that is updated often, such as blogs, events listings, or the revision history of a book. Site owners can add more than one News feed either when setting up the site or at a later time via Manage Tools in Site Info.