RSS news feed helps Workers World bypass censors

The digital edition of Workers World newspaper now has an RSS feed. A free subscription to the Workers World RSS feed is available at Workers.org.

RSS—originally Rich Site Summary but now more often said to mean Really Simple Syndication—is an easy way for Web sites to distribute summaries of what is available. An RSS news feed has a list of the latest headlines that are linked to the full article; clicking on the headline will open the full story on the Web.

RSS has become the preferred method of distributing news headlines and updates by all major news sites. The Cuban newspaper Granma is one news site that has an RSS feed.

RSS feeds are immediately available and automatically updated directly from the Web site to your computer. There is no delay, letting you see immediately the latest stories available from the news site.

Web sites with RSS feeds usually have an orange button that says either RSS or XML. XML—the Extensible Markup Language—is the format used for RSS feeds. If you click on one of the links on a Web page what you will see is a page of XML code. To properly read the feed, you need an RSS reader.

RSS feeds have replaced email distribution for many news sites. This was a trend that Editor & Publisher magazine noticed in the summer of 2003.

RSS feeds are not only immediately updated, they are also easy to access. Email distributions have been a problem for several years, particularly because of the rise in junk email, or spam. Service providers and users now often have junk email blockers that will also sometimes block email coming from news list servers.

For political publications and organizations that have a progressive viewpoint, there have been additional obstacles. Workers World’s email distribution has been blocked by some major Internet Service Providers. During the big anti-war protests around the Iraq war, email subscribers using AOL and Earthlink would frequently find that Workers World articles were being blocked from their email accounts by filters put in place by the ISP.

These filters would be lifted only after repeated complaints about the censorship by Workers World subscribers. At other times, individual articles have been blocked by filters put up by service providers that will block all articles on lesbian, gay, bi and trans issues.

RSS feeds are not subject to this kind of censorship because they are accessed directly from the Web and do not have to pass through any of those filters.

For those new to RSS, there are several ways to access news feeds. The Firefox Web browser from Mozilla.org lets you put RSS feeds into its bookmarks. And for Web sites that are enabled for live bookmarks, such as Workers.org, an icon appears in the bottom right corner of the browser that lets you instantly add the site’s RSS feed to your bookmarks. From the bookmarks, the link will show the list of news headlines that can then be selected to open for reading in the browser.

The Thunderbird email program, also from Mozilla.org, has an RSS newsreader built in. An account can be set up for RSS News & Blogs that will let you then subscribe to RSS feeds and read them in the email
program.

Firefox and Thunderbird are free software, produced as part of the free software movement and are available for all types of computer systems—Windows, Macintosh, Linux and other Unix systems.

For users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Pluck.com offers a free RSS newsreader. Pluck’s Web-based version adds the advantage of being a Web page, making it available from any Windows computer with Internet Explorer. This lets you set it up once and then read your RSS feeds from anywhere you are accessing the Web.