News & Reviews

You may have noticed the little orange RSS icons () peppered over this website (and many others) - ever wondered what that icon does? Well we're going to try to answer that question and give you some examples of how you can use the RSS feeds on our website to save time, make the most of your Midweek Dining Club membership and ultimately make more fantastic savings at restaurants nationwide.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication - it's a technology that gives you more flexibility in how you access information online. RSS has a lot of jargon surrounding it - don't let this put you off. You don't have to be a supergeek to use RSS to save time (and with your Midweek Dining Club membership; save money as well). If you're interested in the technical side of how RSS works there's plenty of information on the Wikipedia RSS page as well as the full RSS specification. For now we're going to focus on what RSS can do for you, and how that relates to The Midweek Dining Club website, and we'll try to explain some of the technobabble along the way.

RSS is primarily used for two things - the technical terms are aggregation and syndication. Aggregation means to bring together information from various different sources (in this case, websites) in one easy convenient place. Syndication means to incorperate the content from one website into another. Unless you run a website, aggregation is going to be what interests you so let's start with an example of how you might use RSS aggregation to save time.

Aggregation - Learn how to use RSS to stay up to date

Imagine, if you will, the websites that you will typically check every day to keep yourself up-to-date with what's going on in the world. Maybe you like to read the Entertainment section of the BBC News website on your morning coffee break to keep up with what's going on in music. On your lunch break you might like to browse Charles Campion's blog to keep abreast of the latest and greatest London restaurants. If you think about it there's probably 3 or 4 websites you check habbitually every day for updates - probably 30 or 40 more that you check occasionally because they're updated less often. 

How often do you check a site to see if there's anything new, only to find there isn't? How much time do you waste scanning around the same web sites every day looking for something new to read? What RSS allows you to do is subscribe to all of your favourite websites within an RSS Reader (or Aggregator as they're sometimes called) and then when you check your RSS Reader you will be given a list of any new content that has appeared on any of the websites you're subscribed to. The RSS Reader does the hard work of visiting each website and checking for updates - all you have to do is read the list your RSS reader creates for you. It's a bit like your e-mail inbox - new items appear when websites are updated and you can mark items as 'read' in same way you would when reading your e-mail. 

RSS is great for keeping track of your daily reads - but the real time saving comes from those websites that aren't updated every day, but you'd still like to hear about it whenever they are, as soon as they are. Without RSS, if you wanted to know immediately when a website is updated you'd have to check it every day even if there's nothing new to read. With RSS, your reader does the checking for you so you can just sit back and forget about it, safe in the knowledge that you will be notified as soon as there is an update to your favourite website. 

Next time you're browsing the web, keep an eye out for the little orange RSS logo () you'll be surprised how many sites have it. When you're convinced it's worth trying an RSS Reader there are several to choose from; there's a complete listing of aggregators at Wikipedia, but if you're just interested in testing it out to see if you could save time, we'd recommend either Google Reader - or trying the built-in RSS aggregators in new versions of most web browsers. Try clicking on the RSS Icon and see if your browser gives you the option to subscribe.  

How does this help me make fantastic savings at restaurants near me?

You can use RSS to get more from your Midweek Dining Club membership - We have placed convenient RSS links at the bottom of every search result page. This allows you to use our Restaurant Finder to conduct a search for your area, then subscribe to that search in your RSS reader. You will then be notified as soon as we add new restaurants within a 30 mile radius of you, allowing you to begin making savings as soon as they become available. We're adding more restaurants all the time and this is a great way to stay up-to-date with our latest deals.

We also have RSS feeds available for our top 30 most recently added deals nationwide and our top 30 most popular restaurants nationwide. These feeds change regularly, all of our feeds are live so new discounts appear as soon as they're added and this happens on a daily basis. It's up to you how much you want to read - you can subscribe to searches for your local area and some of the places you visit most often in the UK, or you can choose to receive the full nationwide updates.

How can I syndicate your content on my own website?

If you'd like to share the savings with visitors to your website, it should be fairly easy to incorporate our RSS Feeds into your site. Most content management systems have an RSS Syndication plugin, and if you can run PHP or ASP, simple RSS aggregation scripts are available. We do ask that you maintain the links back to our restaurant pages unless you have entered into a specific agreement with us as outlined below.

We're open to offers for revenue sharing agreements involving deeper integrations, up-to and including a full whitelabel solution. If you're planning on incorperating our content into your website, please contact us so that we can discuss in more detail how The Midweek Dining Club can fit into your brand.