This page offers suggestions on where and how to find RSS feeds of interest to you. For guidance on setting up a feed reader please see http://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/rss/readers.html.
Where to Find RSS Feeds
The amount and kinds of information available by RSS feed is continually expanding. Some feeds are generic and intended for widespread distribution, while other feeds can be tailored by users to meet specialized information needs. In this section you will find some hints to get you started.
What to Look for
There are a number of different ways that you can add feeds to your list of subscriptions.
Many RSS readers have built in directories where users can select feeds on particular topics. These directories offer a quick way to get started with generic feeds.
Orange (sometimes blue) RSS, ATOM, or XML buttons:
. Many web pages will have a small orange rectangle with the initials “RSS” or “XML.” When you click on this button, you will be directed to the XML source code in which the feed is packaged. You can copy the url from your browser’s address window and paste it into the appropriate field in your reader in order to subscribe to the feed.
-
Some browsers display the latter icon in their address box when the page you are viewing offers a feed. You click on the icon to subscribe to the feed.
Other things to look for include the words: syndication, site feed, and subscribe
You can also try searching the site you are interested in for “RSS” or related terms.
Scholarly Indexes and Databases
Some scholarly indexes and databases are now offering RSS feeds as a way to subscribe to search results. You will be notified of any new items that meet your search criteria. At Wesleyan, the Religion Database by Ebsco is a prominent example. Note that for the moment, in order to activate the RSS option, you'll have to click on the "New Features" link in the upper right of the Ebsco interface, and then you'll have to check the box to enable "One Step Alerts." After that you'll see an RSS icon on every search results screen to "Create alert for this search."
News Organizations
Increasing numbers of news organizations are making content available through RSS feeds.
Whatever major news source you are interested in, the chances are good that they offer RSS feeds.
Professional Organizations
Scholarly organizations are another likely source for RSS feeds of professional interest. Since blogs almost always offer feeds, an organization’s blog is a likely place to look.
The American Pyschological Association (APA), for example, offers a feed for their online publication
Psychology in the News.
A large number of
APA journals likewise offer feeds that alert subscribers when new content is available. Typically, the feed will provide a table of contents and an abstract. Access to the articles themselves may then be restricted to subscribers. You can see all of the
APA journals that offer feeds by clinking the link.
Academic Publishers
In a similar vein, many academic publishers now offer feeds that will keep subscribers up to date on new titles or tables of contents.
Cambridge Journals has an extensive list of publications for which they offer feeds,
The American Political Science Review and
The Japanese Journal of Political Science for example.
Blackwell offers an interesting RSS service. You can subscribe to a feed for a particular article (your own, for instance) in order to be alerted any time it is cited in another Blackwell article.
Click here to see a sample page.
The University of California Press offers individual feeds for each of its
journals. Click on the journal title and you’ll find the generic
link in the lower right corner.
-
-
Blogs (and Other Web2.0 Phenomena)
In addition to making it relatively easy for individuals to publish content to the web, blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking tools also put the power of syndication in the hands of an individual. As a matter of course, most blogs automatically offer RSS feeds. Scholars might be on the look-out for blogs by leaders in their fields or by scholarly organizations.
Classisists, for example, might be interested in a feed from
The Stoa Consortium which purports to serve “news, projects, and links for digital classicists everywhere.”
-
A number of
social bookmarking services –
del.icio.us prominent among them – offer RSS feeds for individual searches. By subscribing to a search you sign up to be notified when future postings fulfill your search criteria.
-
Mailing Lists
Many groups that previously offered mailing lists now offer RSS feeds instead (or in addition). The advantage of RSS over mailing lists is that the information provider does not have to manage the list. Subscribers often appreciate the way RSS feeds do not clutter up their in-boxes. If you use Bloglines, you can ‘convert’ mailing list postings to an RSS feed by filtering your mail automatically and sending the list postings to a special bloglines address.
In some cases, individuals convert mailing lists to RSS feeds for the benefit of others, as in the case of the two main mailing lists for supercolliders, sc-users and sc-dev.
Wesleyan Feeds
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
One can also subscribe to
Wesleying, a collaborative blog of student life at Wesleyan.
In addition to the aggregated events calendar feed, you can subscribe to events by category by clicking the "RSS" button on the right-hand side of the relevant screen at
http://events.wesleyan.edu/. Please note, however, that these categorized feeds will only deliver events scheduled for the current day.
In general, every channel on the Wesleyan web pages offers a feed. The formula for the url that you need to enter into your feeder is:
http://www.wesleyan.edu/cgi-bin/cdf_manager/channel_renderer.cgi/?rss=1&channel= name of channel
Feed Directories and Library Resources
-
-
-
-
RSS page in “About Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki”
-
-
-
-
Zetoc By the look of it, this is the right idea. No access without a subscription, however.
-
Search Engines
and the cryptic
