Student Information Blog

Want to keep up on enrollment dates, scholarships, financial aid news and other important information affecting you as a student? The DCCCD Student Information Blog has articles about events, new academic programs, important dates and anything else we think might help you make the most of your experience.

Subscribe via RSS to have updates delivered to you, or come back often — we're here to help!

Get Blog Posts Delivered to You Automatically!

There are two ways to get blog posts sent to you — email and RSS. When you subscribe by one of these methods, you will be sent the newly published content every time we publish articles.

Subscribing to Our Blogs Via Email

To subscribe, simply go to the blog and look for "Get email updates!" or the "Follow" tab in the lower right-hand side of the browser window (see example on the right).

Enter your email address in the box and click "Subscribe!" You will get an email from WordPress with a link to confirm your subscription. You must click that link to confirm your email address. The email also warns you that "by subscribing you are exposing your email address to the owner of the website," which in this case is no big deal — it's our blog, and we're the owner of the website. You may want to be careful doing this with websites you do not trust.

Subscribing to Blogs Via RSS

Here's how:

1. If you don't already have an RSS service, join one.
2. Enter the URLs of the college or district blog(s) of your choice into your feed reader.

For more information about how to do this, see the instructions below.

Old Blog Posts Are Searchable

You can always go back to the blog at http://dcccdinfo.wordpress.com to search for back issues or other articles on a topic by keyword or tag. We're gradually entering the old student enewsletter articles, so you may occasionally get an email for an old article as well because WordPress emails you every time we post, not just when we post articles with a current date.

What Is RSS?

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication." It is the best way to get content from many different websites all in one place. RSS is like an email inbox for all of the websites you like to visit. Most websites have RSS feeds so that new posts can be sent directly to you when they're published. You may have seen the (usually) orange "RSS" icon like the one on the left on other websites you've been to.

RSS delivers "feeds" of new Web content that can include links, headlines, photos, videos and text summaries. News outlets like The New York Times even offer RSS feeds broken down by news category or subject, but most websites and blogs deliver one feed for their whole blog via RSS, like we do with our blogs.

Read more about RSS feeds or for a simpler explanation, watch RSS in Plain English by Common Craft and find more feeds at http://www.dcccd.edu/RSS. 

How Do I Subscribe to an RSS Feed?

We recommend you choose a Web-based RSS application like Google Reader or Yahoo so that your subscriptions are "in the cloud," which means they are viewable on the Web and safe from computer crashes or lost laptops.

My Yahoo! has a feed reader built in, and Gmail has a service called Google Reader that is connected to your Gmail account. If you have an account with Yahoo or Google already, you can start subscribing to RSS feeds. If you don't have an account, you can sign up for one and begin using it in a matter of minutes.

I Have My Feed Reader — Now What?

When you've chosen which feed reader you want to use, you can begin signing up for feeds by going to the websites you want to get information from and finding the RSS feeds.

When you go to a website and see the RSS icon, you can usually click on that icon and the RSS feed sample will appear in your browser window. You will see options about which service you want to use to subscribe.

• If you use Google Reader, all you have to do is copy and paste the URL of the website you want to subscribe to into the Subscribe box in Google Reader. Google Reader will automatically pull in the RSS feed for that website, and you're done. Learn more on the Google Reader help site.
• If you use My Yahoo! the requirements are the same — copy the URL of the website you want to subscribe to, and add it to your My Yahoo! tab. Complete directions with screenshots can be found on the My Yahoo! help site.

Blog Topics

Our blog has articles about events, programs, important dates and other things we think are important to DCCCD students. Do you have topics you would like us to write about? Email the Internet Publishing Team!