Confused about what all these things mean? Don't know what words like "Podcast" or "RSS" are? Technologically illiterate? It's amazing you've made it this far. But, you've come to the right place. Grab a pen, I'm about to drop some knowledge!
Note: You will need adobe acrobat reader or an equivalent pdf reader.
Newsletter
We now offer the ability to download the monthly newsletter in .pdf (portable document format) format. Why is this a good thing? I'm glad you asked. This allows you to receive the newsletter quicker, in full color, lessens the amount of paper used by us to print (so you're saving the environment), saves us money in paper, ink and postage that can then be used for other things in Student Ministries, and it saves us time in printing all the newsletters (and believe me, it's quite a process to print them).
So, on the Newsletter Page, if you click on the link you will open a file in your browser (or may ask you to download the file) that will contain all of the information that you would see in the paper version of the newsletter, except this way you will see it in full color! In the case of downloading, remember what the location is that you are saving the file to, go to that file and double click on the file to view the newsletter.
Podcast
This is something that iTunes has popularized in a big way. You can think of a podcast as a radio show or a magazine with each of our newsletters being an "episode" or an "issue". Podcasts have episodes that are stored on a computer somewhere, you subscribe to them through iTunes, and then iTunes does the work by checking for new episodes and then downloads them into your iTunes program (this should happen by default unless you change the options). You then are able to listen to or view in this case, the episode by clicking on "Podcasts" in the sidebar, finding "Elevate Student Ministries" in the list and then double clicking on the episode you are wishing to view.
You can subscribe to this here or subscribe in iTunes manually by clicking on "Advanced>>Subscribe to Podcast" and typing this link into the "URL" box.
URL: elevatesm.org/podcast
RSS
This stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and is used largely by news companies like CNN, or ESPN. They are XML based webpages that an RSS reader will interpret into news items or stories. You can think of an RSS feed like a newspaper, with each article being the equivalent of one of our newsletters.
You can subscribe to the RSS feed with readers such as iGoogle, SharpReader, Mail.app and RssReader. Simply subscribe using the following:
URL: elevatesm.org/rss
Example: iGoogle. Go to google.com/ig to create your igoogle page. You can see right in the center of the page that I've subscribed to the ELEVATE Newsletter RSS feed in iGoogle.
You can add this or other RSS feeds to your iGoogle page by clicking "Add Stuff" on the right side of your page. You will then be brought to a page that looks like this.
You can type in the URL into the box that appears at the bottom left of your page, click "Add" and you're good to go.
Additional Questions
Here are a few websites that might help if you are still confused
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
If you are still confused, please email Chris with your specific questions!
