Reading this site by RSS

BJS news — Subscribe by RSS

For those who have had a hard time tracking new items posted to this site, you may be interested in a new feature that we recently added. At the bottom-right of any page on the site, there are three feeds; RSS feed, Atom feed, and a RSS Comments feed.

For those who have no clue what RSS means, here are a few paragraphs that will hopefully help you understand:

Many websites with fast changing content such as BJS make their content available in feed form for the convenience of readers using news aggregators.

A news aggregator or news reader is a program which runs on your computer (or on the web) and tracks changes to websites that you are interested in. The news reader will present a list of identified changes in the form of short summaries of the new content, and allow you to “click through” to read the new content. Most news aggregators allow you to ‘subscribe’ to several feeds, and automatically keep track of the articles you have read from each website. The intent of a news reader is to make information come to you (via the feed reader) instead of you going out to look for it (via the Web).

The feed in its simplest form is simply a short file that is posted on the site that contains a summary of all newly-posted articles. RSS, or “Really Simple Syndication”, is one definition stating the format of this file. An RSS feed can contain a summary of content or the full text, based on what the publishing site (such as BJS) desires.

Wikipedia’s list of feed aggregators is fairly up-to-date and most are available for free.

Those of you who already use RSS readers (for example, https://google.com/reader, Internet Explorer, which has a feed reader built in, or one of the other readers listed in Wikipedia above) will know how to add these to your reader. Those who don’t have one, simply click on the RSS or RSS Comments feed at the bottom right of any page. It’s better to have a reader, as they keep track of which articles/comments you have already read, and just highlight the new ones. You can copy the URL from the address bar into a reader, or use the “discovery” function of your news reader to find our feed. Typically our feeds will already have been discovered in most readers, so it should find it easily; if not, comment on this post and we’ll help you.

For those who don’t have an RSS reader, you can directly click on RSS at the bottom right of any BJS webpage to view the latest articles posted to the site. Clicking on RSS Comments shows you the latest comments that have been posted. You can click through to read the articles/comments in context (i.e. directly on the site) as you desire.

If this didn’t explain it adequately, or you want more information, a good resource that I’ve found is here.