Microsoft unleashed Windows 8.1 on the world today and with it comes support for adding website notifications to your start screen. We've been playing around with the technology during the preview period to ensure Sidepodcast updates can be pinned to your screen from launch day.

If you've already upgraded your system to the latest and greatest edition of Windows, open the Internet Explorer tile, navigate to this very site and tap on the 'Favourites' star icon at the bottom of your screen.

A popup will appear, and from there select the 'Pin site' icon before choosing from four sizes of tile, tweaking the label as desired. Tap 'Pin to start' to complete the process and close the browser to return to your multicoloured tapestry of tiles.

For all except the smallest of tile sizes, the latest site headlines should continually loop into view, containing the title and a preview image. Fresh stories should appear as they're posted.

It should be noted we've integrated these tiles based on a beta version of the operating system, following unfinished documentation, on a virtual machine running inside a rather small window. I can't claim that we've nailed the user experience from day one, but we will try and get our hands on an actual Windows tablet in the coming days and test it in anger.

Live Tiles truly appear to offer users a fantastic means of keeping up-to-date with their favourite sites. It looks for all the world like a user-friendly version of RSS, where subscriptions are ridiculously easy to manage and updates are always visible. It will be interesting to see if these prove popular with users, I for one already wish our devices supported them.

Please do let us know if you've pinned Sidepodcast and how it works out for you.