Get Connected

In this section, you can:

Subscribe to our newsletter
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter
Subscribe to, and learn all about, RSS feeds

Subscribe to our newsletter

The best way to stay on top of all the English news and views in Canadian Fair Trade, delivered right to your inbox every two months.

The Trading Post

Stay informed on our latest news!

Find us on Facebook and Twitter

Subscribe to our feeds

In addition to our French and English newsletters, much of the content of our website can be subscribed to via feeds. Below are some of the most popular:

 Fair Trade in the News
 Editorials

 Registered Companies
 Suspended Companies
 Deregistered Companies

You can also make your own custom feeds, allowing you to only receive the specific content you're looking for. To do that, simply type something into the search field in the top right-hand corner of any webpage, press enter, and then click the button marked "XML".

Do note that much of the French and English content of our website is different (including news articles, editorials, and our newsletter). If you're bilingual, you may want to take a look at the French side of our website and subscribe to a few things there too.

What the heck is a feed and what does it have to do with me?

Throughout this website you'll see little orange boxes that look like this.

These little boxes let you know that a feed is available (also known as "RSS", "web feeds", "news feeds", or sometimes just "feeds"), and they allow you to subscribe to different parts of our website without sharing your email address.

Subscribing to a feed will allow you to stay on top of any new content without actually having to visit our website. While we would love for you to visit our site daily, we know that may not be convenient for you. This is especially true if you're only intersted in certain areas of our website.

It works like this - you subscribe to a feed with a program on your computer or through a web service, and that program or service checks our website for new content for you.

Unlike an email newsletter, you don't provide us with an email address to send content to you. Rather you'll pull the content from us - it's anonymous, and you can unsubscribe from a feed at any time.

Now that you know what to look for, you'll notice just how many of the sites you routinely visit have feeds. For instance, practically every news site will have a number of feeds.

If you're still not sure about feeds, perhaps this short video from Common Craft will help.

How do I use a feed?

1. Choose a Feed Reader

There are all sorts of programs out there that can read a feed, some of which are free and some are not.

At a minimum, most email programs (Thunderbird, Outlook, Entorage, etc.) and web browsers (Firefox, Explorer, Safari, etc.) can read feeds.

Other programs are designed specifically to read and organize all of the feeds you subscribe to, tend to display them in a more appealing manner, and are particularly useful if you subscribe to lots of feeds.

These programs often look just like email programs with the websites portrayed like "mail folders" and the individual articles or pages portrayed like emails.

Just like with email, there are also web-based feed readers. Google Reader is an example of a free service and is featured in the Common Craft video, but it's only one of many options.

We don't recommend any particular program or service, so you should feel free to search for whichever program or online service best suits your needs.

2. Decide which feeds you want to subscribe to.

You can do this right from a page where you see an orange box (including this one).

3. Subscribe to a feed

Depending on the browser you're using, subscribing to a feed is usually just a matter of clicking on the link next to the little orange box (or sometimes just clicking the box itself).

If that doesn't work, or you just end up looking at a page with a bunch of nonsense on it, you can try the following three-step approach:

First, you find the button or option in your feed reader program that allows you to add a subscription. When you click on the option, your program will ask you for a feed address.

Second, right-click on the orange box/link of the page you want to subscribe to, and select, "Copy Link Location".

Third, go back to your feed reader and paste the link you just copied into the space where you are to enter the feed address.

And that's it.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at communicationstransfair [dot] ca.