RSS News Feeds for Class Information

Tired of checking your class Web pages every day to see whether I've posted anything new? Tired of missing important news because you forgot to check?

This is an experiment in using an RSS news feed as a way to help you keep up with changes I make in the class Web pages. If you are already using RSS, you can subscribe to news about your class and find out about changes using your RSS reader. It works like any other RSS news feed; the orange icon on your class Web page is a link to an XML file with the news content. If you're not already using RSS, read New to RSS? below.

The news feeds for my classes are in RSS 2.0 format. Any RSS relatively recent reader should be able to handle them. You should know that the news files for my classes are kept up manually, so they're not absolutely guaranteed to be completely up to date, but I'm trying!

If you have an opinion about the utility (or lack thereof!) of RSS feeds for this purpose, please write to me: .

New to RSS?

RSS (and Atom) are methods of using the Internet, specifically HTTP, the protocol of the World Wide Web, to "syndicate" news and other information. The data are in XML files in one of four or five formats. You can use a news reader program or Web service to subscribe to a number of news feeds. The reader program automatically checks for updates every few hours and displays the latest news for you. If you want more details, you can check this article(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed) from Wikipedia.

To read RSS feeds, you will need (as you might expect) an RSS reader. The folks at allrss.com have published a Compendium of RSS Readers. (http://allrss.com/rssreaders.html) Free readers recommended by people I trust include Feedreader (http://www.feedreader.com/) and Rss Bandit (http://www.rssbandit.org/)

I am using FeedReader to test my feeds. It has the great advantage of being free. You can get your own copy of it here: http://www.feedreader.com/. FeedReader will happily sit in the system tray and download news for you. When a new item is available, FeedReader alerts you with a sound (optional) and a pop-up window. In case you aren't near your computer, the icon in the system tray changes, too. To get your class news into FeedReader (and most other desktop reader programs), do the following:

• Place the mouse cursor on the orange RSS icon and click the right mouse button
• choose "Copy Shortcut" (it's "Copy link location" in Firefox)
• Start FeedReader and click the "New" button
• The URL of the feed will be copied automagically from the clipboard.
• Be sure you've got the right stuff in the URL box and click "OK." Done!

With Firefox 2.0 and above, you can just click the orange RSS button, then click "Subscribe new."

Class news in FeedReader looks like this:

Google also has an RSS reader service. If you have a Google account and you've installed the Google toolbar, you have a "subscribe" button that will let you read class news on your Google home page.

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Last updated: 2008-11-01 17:58