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About news feeds

What are news feeds?

News feeds are a popular way for websites to syndicate their content. The Bible Gateway publishes content (such as the Verse of the Day) in a news feed. When you subscribe to a news feed, you can receive that content as soon as it's published, without the need to visit the Bible Gateway website. If you subscribe to our Verse of the Day feed, for instance, the Verse of the Day will automatically be sent to you each day. Subscribing to a news feed is free.

Is it like email?

Yes, news feeds are similar in many ways to email. Like email, you can subscribe to the content you want and have it sent directly to you. However, news feeds have several advantages over email. You don't have to provide any personal information (like an email address) when you subscribe to a news feed, and you don't have to go through a complicated process to unsubscribe from a feed—unsubscribing is just a matter of deleting that feed. In short, news feeds are safer and easier to manage than email.

How do I read a news feed?

To read a news feed such as our Verse of the Day feed, you'll need to use a program that can receive and read feeds. Some email programs (such as Thunderbird) have the ability to read feeds built-in, and there are programs available to add feed-reading capability to other email programs like Outlook. However, many people use programs called feed readers to manage and read their feed subscriptions. There are many feed readers available for all computer platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.), and many of them are free. One of the more popular free feed readers is FeedReader; there are many others available to try out, as a Google search will reveal.

If you don't want to use a separate program to read feeds, there are several web-based services that let you read and manage feeds online using your normal web browser. Bloglines and Google Reader are two examples of such services.

So how do I subscribe to a Bible Gateway feed?

Subscribing to a Bible Gateway feed is fairly straightforward:

1. Set up a program to read feeds (see "How do I read a news feed?" above for details on doing this).
2. Create a new channel in your feed reader program with the URL of the feed to which you'd like to subscribe. Each feed reader program has its own way of subscribing to a feed, so follow the instructions for whichever program you're using. The URL for the Bible Gateway Verse of the Day feed is http://www.biblegateway.com/votd/get/?format=atom; other Bible Gateway feeds will have their own URLs.
3. That's it! Once you've created your new channel, you are subscribed to that feed and will receive new content automatically whenever it is posted.