Postat: A Cross-Platform, RSS-based Advertising and Event Notification System for Educational Institutions

The online advertising techniques, such as emails and display advertising, offer a wide range of benefits to the business community. Recently, these techniques were extended to include social media and interactive ads to reach the target customers precisely. However, using these techniques in a local community such as universities, colleges and schools become a reliable announcement and notification systems. In this paper, we introduce our notification system Post@ (pronounced “postat”). Post@ is a RSS-based web service that automatically delivers announcements, posted by a publisher, to subscribers' PCs or smartphones directly. Post@ updates can be easily accessed through any RSS reader (desktop gadgets, dashboard widgets, or mobile apps) that is connected to the private or public channels of our system. Post@ was implemented and tested on many operating systems and devices within our university and the evaluation results showed an excellent subscribers' satisfaction.