CousinConnect.com is the latest genealogy site to add RSS news feeds. I suspect you will see many more sites adding RSS during 2005. Here is the announcement from CousinConnect.com:
CousinConnect.com, a leading online genealogy query website, is the latest to add RSS newsfeed support. Everytime your RSS newsreader synchronizes with its newsfeed, it will pull in the latest genealogy queries. Instead of visiting CousinConnect to see the latest queries, you can have them delivered to your RSS newsreader.
What makes CousinConnect's RSS feeds different from the others is that it allows you to create customized feeds. You can elect to receive only those queries for a specific surname, or only those associated with a specific country, state, or county, or even those with a combination of the two. CousinConnect is the first genealogy website to offer customized feeds.
To create a customized feed, go to CousinConnect's homepage, and either search for a surname, or navigate down to a desired country, state, or county. Look to the far-right column (you might need to scroll down a little). You will see a link entitled, "RSS this search". Click that link, it will display your customized newsfeed.
To get a newsfeed customized for a specific surname AND geographical region, first navigate down to a desired country, state, or county, and then conduct a surname search from there. You can even get a surname newsfeed using Soundex Matching, by going to CousinConnect's Advanced Search page. Basically, any search parameters entered into CousinConnect will yield an accompanying RSS newsfeed URL.
CousinConnect's RSS newsfeeds are assembled on the fly whenever a newsfeed URL is requested, thus no RSS files are stored on the server, making it possible to create millions and millions of customized feeds.
"We hope that our new RSS feeds will help genealogists get more answers to their queries, much more quickly", says Sheila Ruth, the programmer behind CousinConnect. "That's the goal of CousinConnect, to be the most effective genealogy query website".
You can find CousinConnect at http://www.cousinconnect.com.
