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.

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.
• Other sites feature buttons that automatically install a feed into one or more specific readers: and the cryptic are typical examples.
• 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.

Increasing numbers of news organizations are making content available through RSS feeds.

• The //New York Times// is a noteworthy example, offering a wide range of topic-specific feeds.
• National Public Radio offers News Feeds, Program Feeds, Topic Feeds, and Station Feeds. On the same page, you will find links to a number of downloadable or web-based readers.
• You can also use RSS to keep tabs on foreign news sources

Whatever major news source you are interested in, the chances are good that they offer RSS feeds.

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.

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.
• The Yale University Press offers an RSS feed for its new releases.
• The University of Chicago Press offers an array of feeds for new releases in particular subject areas.

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.”
• You might try a Google Blog Search on a topic of your choice.
• 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.
• Bookmarking services with an academic orientation include CiteULike and Connotea.

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.

• New Books in the Wesleyan University Library
• Wesleyan Events Calendar
• Wesleyan Argus
• New Posts from the Wesleyan Classifieds
• The Wesleyan Presidential Search
• Wesleyan Homepage News
• Wesleyan Newsletter Headlines
• Blackwell offers a table-of-contents subscription for the journal History & Theory, which is published at Wesleyan.
• The Technology of the Month (Tom) blog from ITS offers a feed.
• There’s a feed for the wallace_stevens discussion list.
• Student groups like the Eclectic Society offer calendar updates via RSS.
• 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

• New Books in the Wesleyan University Library
• RSS Compendium
• College and University Feed Directory
  • Libraries - New Acquisitions: Feeds from academic Libraries
    • RSS page in “About Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki”
  • Journals and Publications
  • A feed for postings to the Syndication for Higher Ed blog
  • There is even a new-feed feed for this directory!
• syndic8
• Zetoc By the look of it, this is the right idea. No access without a subscription, however.
• Medical Feeds catalogs a wide array of medical subscriptions.

• http://www.feedster.com/
• http://www.blogdigger.com/