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Alabama State Board
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Alabama State Board
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For your greater convenience you may now keep track of updates to the ASBVME website far more easily. The new method being employed is called a syndication feed, which you may have heard of elsewhere. All modern web browsers now support this new method. Here is how it works.
First check to see if your browser-of-choice properly supports syndication feeds. There is a list available on a website here: Link. Know in particular that MSIE only does so starting with version 7, which itself is available only for WinXP and above, not for Win2K and below. We recommend switching to Firefox in that particular case. Firefox has supported feeds since version 1.5 and is less vulnerable to viruses and the like in any case.
If your browser happens to be Firefox, then look into the URL window, that long white entry-box at the top of your browser which at the moment is showing http://asbvme.us at its left. Note the little orange icon at its right-hand extreme. That is the feed icon. You will see that little icon for any website which has enabled syndication feeds. Now do as follows:
If your browser happens to be Internet Explorer version 7, then do not expect any clear and obvious indication of a feed being present. Instead, MSIE will require you to ask directly, every time, before you can learn whether the website you are visiting has a feed. For that, do as follows:
Pull down the Tools menu to discover if there is a feed. 
Click on said listing and the feed will be displayed. Once your browser has accepted our syndication feed, it will periodically check the ASBVME website and automatically take note of any updated documents or announcements. If a new update should appear at the top of the syndication feed listing, then you have only to click on it to directly download said document in its latest version.
The sunrise date for syndication feed tracking began on 2007-02-25. Thus no updates prior to then will be listed. But any new ones afterwards shall. No longer will you need to peruse the document list or call the central office to know if there has been an update.
As I write this introduction to our new syndication feed service, no new updates or announcements have yet been made in the very recent past. So the list, at present, is very short, almost empty. The only item appearing therein as of this moment points here, to this very page announcing the service.
The feed listing is very terse. About all it shows in your average browser is the name of the feed and the titles of listings. Yet the feed itself does contain a bit more information. It is even sortable by Title, Category or Update time. Should you wish to avail yourself of these extra features there are several options. The most common is to employ a feed reader, which is a special program for reading feeds. If you are a blogger, then you already know what this is. Another way is to use your email reader. Most modern email readers can be requested to also read feeds. A final way is to look at the feed directly in your browser. Most feeds are poorly suited to browser viewing but ours is better than most. So if the first two methods do not suit your needs, then bookmark a link to our feed here: Feed Link But only do so if you really want to peruse the feed itself for its added features of a summary and content description for each listed update. Beyond that there is no particular need to do so in which case you merely rely upon the browser toolbar.
And that is all there is to it. Should you wish to know how this works in order to do similarly for our own office website, only very minimal computer skills are required. Nor does it cost any extra. If interested, have a look at my fairly complete how-to on the topic here: http://starling.us/atom.
We hope this new service meets with your satisfaction.
Respectfully,
Gan Uesli Starling, Webmaster