The New DU Homepage has an RSS/XML Feed

[Skinner]

To find it, look at the right column of our new homepage. The link looks like this:

        RSS/XML

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in this thread.

Skinner, EarlG, and Elad
The DU Administrators

[acmejack]

1. I subscribed to it from this link

worked perfectly on Opera. btw, you guyz are really doing extraordinary work on the site! If you get down to Austin I'll buy you a drink! OK, maybe two...three...

[Skinner]

2. Thanks.

I don't make it down to Austin very often these days, but if I do I'll take that drink.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

3. Well.......um...........I think maybe

technology has passed me by. What exactly is RSS/XML? :shrug: I'm trying to keep up, honest I am........ :)

[Elad]

4. It's a way of syndicating web content

You can also use it, for example, to download news headlines from many sources at once. Many modern browsers have integrated RSS readers that allow you to integrate the headlines into your browser, as well.

For more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)

[donsu]

5. me too - what's a RSS/XML?

nt

[BlooInBloo]

13. Quick tutorial to give you the flavor of what the hubbub is....

(1) I assume a Windows XP setup.

(2) Download, install, run this: http://www.rssbandit.org/ow.asp?DownLoad

(3) Go to your fav blog or whatever (or DU apparently - lol), and search the page (ctrl-f) for "rss" or "xml" - this should take you on the page to a URL.

(4) Copy that URL (right click, Copy Link or something similar)

(5) Go to the rss reader thingie that you still don't know what it does

(6) Go through the reader's "Subscribe to new RSS feed process", using the url you copied from step (4). (I don't recall the actual mouse clicks for this, but it's completely straightforward)

(7) After subscribing to a feed, it should now be pretty apparently what the functionality of an "rss aggregator" is.

hth!

[BlooInBloo]

12. Do you remember standalone USENET newsreaders?

Like Free Agent or NewsXpress? In terms of the end effect to the user, rss "aggregators" present a similar screen to the user.

Look up RSS Bandit on google - it's an awesome rss client - and it's opensource (if you don't know what that is, don't worry about it)

hth

[SharonRB]

6. How do you subscribe?

When I click on it all I get is a bunch of html code.

[acmejack]

7. You need to get a RSS reader.

There are some good free ones at ZDnet Downloads or at Reuters Alertnet at the RSS Page.

[Mr. McD]

8. Freereader is a fairly good news reader and it's free

http://www.feedreader.com/

[peacetalksforall]

9. That's all we need - faster news. I'm just JOKING! Seriously, is that

why the news gets to DU so fast besides having members who read a variety of papers and services?

So all you RSS people are on the front line feeding it to us who are behind you?

[Buck Rabbit]

10. Works great with Firefox, took about 10 seconds to setup.

Firefox has RSS built in. On your address bar when you are viewing the DU homepage there is a RSS symbol to the far left.

I clicked on that and it created an RSS bookmark. I had the bookmark put onto my bookmark toolbar. Voila.

You click on the bookmark on the toolbar and down drops a page of hot topics. Very cool.

I also have BBC RSS bookmark for latest headlines.

[Jazz2006]

11. Cool.

Five minutes ago, I didn't know anything about RSS but I just clicked on the link and it worked and let me subscribe and read it without having to download anything ~ I'm tickled!

Thanks, Skinner!

:toast:

[Brazenly Liberal]

14. Working great with Sage!

Thanks! I love RSS!

(For anyone who has Firefox, Sage is a nice little extension that lets you gather and manage feeds without having to download a bigger program.)

[chellinsky]

15. Thanks for the Feed!

The lack of feeds is what has kept me from the DU for a while. Thanks for making one!

However, it appears to not work with my aggregater (Dave Winer's OPML Editor's NewsRiver tool). I get the following error when trying to subscribe to the feed:

Can't subscribe to the channel. The most likely cure is to check the URL in a web browser and see if you can get it to read the feed. The following message probably won't help you figure out what went wrong, but we include it here because it might. "Can't evaluate the expression because the name "/pcdata" hasn't been defined."

I'm not entirely sure what it means, but there it is if it means anything to you. It does appear to open in a web browser correctly for me. The only difference I can find between other feeds I subscribe to and this one is that others are encoded in UTF-8 and DU's is encoded in ISO-8859-1. Hope this helps.

[Dr Ron]

16. RSS Reader Reccomendations

I see recommendations for RSS Bandit and Feedreader above.

Both had some good points, but once I got heavily into using RSS readers I was running into some problems with both. (Don't let that stop you from trying them. They might have been fixed in upgrades, and it is likely that some of the problems could have been related to the numerous other programs I had running.

For those who want a high powered RSS reader, check out:

http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/

It is more complex, but has many more features. They have both paid and free versions. Unless you also want to use it for email, the free version should have everything most need.

Fortunately there are ways to transfer you RSS feeds from one program to another so you can start with a simpler one and go on to try others.

There are also many web sites which allow you to read your rss feeds, but personally I prefer the destop programs for their greater power. There are also sites like my.yahho.com which are useful as a home page, and which allow you to enter RSS feeds. Firefox (an excellent and free web browser) has limited RSS capabilities but might be another place to start for those who haven't been using RSS feeds.

[huskerlaw]

17. For those of you with Yahoo...

You can add an RSS feed to your My Yahoo homepage. Just go here: http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php
and add the link to the DU RSS feed.

Thanks Skinner, that's awesome!

[stevietheman]

18. I see a problem with the feed right off the bat

I display multiple news feeds on three different websites, and I've been doing this for years now.

Right off the bat, I see a technical issue with the DU RSS feed, in that nonstandard tags (beginning with a square bracket) aren't being resolved to HTML or removed. This is problematic when taking the feed data and directing it for redisplay. Please consider that converting these nonstandard tags is nontrivial for non-programmers.

Note: I really would like to display the DU feed on my personal website, but I need this issue resolved before I can proceed. Thanks!

[noel adamson]

19. Inclusion in web pages is easy too.

If you have minimal web design knowledge. I use magpie rss which is a free script to include feeds in web sites of my own and for others. http://sourceforge.net/projects/magpierss