Being prepared for an emergency is just one of the purposes of this website. Another purpose of the website is to keep you informed of current emergencies by making announcements as they happen keeping you, the public, in the know.

If you want to keep up-to-date with breaking news as it happens, we suggest you subscribe to our RSS feed.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a very basic feed of information that your personal organiser and keep subscribed to. Your system, whether it is a piece of software or a website, will repeatedly check an RSS feed at set periods of time to see if new entries have been posted. If there are any new entries, it will download it for when you are ready. Some RSS reading software alerts you to new entries - it all depends on your set up.

What does this mean?

In theory, you could be subscribed to the West Midlands Prepared RSS feed and be alerted within minutes when an emergency has happened.

How do I subscribe?

If you see the RSS icon anywhere, this identifies an RSS feed. It is normally associated with a link to the feed (known as a “Feed URL”). If you copy and paste the Feed URL into your RSS software, you will subscribe to the feed. It’s that easy!

West Midlands Prepared feeds

• Emergencies
• News
• Website Updates
• Featured Members
• All of the above

Software

Below is a list of recommended RSS readers for you to use.

Windows 2000/XP/Vista

• FeedReader
• Firefox

Mac OS 9/OSX

• Safari
• Screensaver (OSX only)

Online

• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• Newsgator
• Netvibes

Further Reading

For more information about RSS feeds and readers, please visit the Wikipedia page where you can find out how it works, other recommended uses and useful software and websites.