Workers World’s RSS news feed
By
Gary Wilson
Published Mar 30, 2005 10:52 AM
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 most news sites.
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
the browser after the URL that lets you 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.
Google Reader is a free RSS client that can be used by all to subscribe to RSS feeds and read them.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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