Ever wondered how, when you first log onto Freedom Gardens, the latest postings in every forum are displayed for you?  This is an example of RSS, or 'Really Simple Syndication'. 

The Freedom Gardens site is very powerful, because you can customize this for yourself.

From one's profile page, one can "Subscribe to RSS".
This allows the user to receive newsfeeds from Freedom Gardens directly to their newsreader (these are generally free - if you have a Google account, for example, you have access to their Google Reader; other services have similar).

You can subscribe to a friend's Garden Journal, for instance.
Go to their profile page and click on "Subscribe to RSS", and then scoot down to the Heading "Blog Entries".  Click the button there for the service you use, and every time they make a journal entry, it will be sent to your newsfeed.

Or you can watch every one of their recent activities on Freedom Gardens with the RSS feed from the heading "Activities".

And of course, you can have the entire 'Community Activity' sent to your newsreader, just like it is displayed on your home page when you first log in.  Look for the RSS symbol beside the 'Community Activity' heading the next time you are there.  You can have the last 20 activities sent to your Reader.

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One thing I haven't been able to do, so far:

It would also be nice to get an RSS feed of a specific group.
For example, I have written a lot in the 'Bread' group, which is actually part of the 'Homegrown & Homemade' Group; so if I get a newsfeed from 'Homegrown & Homemade' (channel 8), it only sends me the heading 'bread', it doesn't send what was written in that group.

Does anyone know of a work-around for this?  It should be possible, because when you go to a group's 'Detail' page, the latest activity is scrolled below, and I think that this is an RSS feed.  But I don't see any RSS buttons here for me to subscribe with.

I don't believe that is an RSS feed. It looks like it is generated by php scripts on the fly with data pulled from the database.

Let's see if the tool I use to create RSS feeds for my static websites works for you...

Try subscribing to this home-grown feed (sounds SO Freedom Garden):

Let me know if it works the way you want or not...

Thanks! That took some effort, and I appreciate the attempt.
But it doesn't seem to work the way I wanted it to; it doesn't feed the group updates, just provides a link to the group's title always. That's the same thing that happened when I subscribed to 'Homegrown and Homemade'.
Oh well, probably no one but me would want to subscribe to a group anyway. Thanks again.