Syndication Feeds

Syndication Feeds

Syndication feeds are available for this site in four different formats, so you are welcome to use whichever works best with your RSS aggregator:

• RSS 0.91
• RSS 1.0
• RSS 2.0
• ATOM

The default feed is RSS 2.0. The feeds update about every four hours.

What on Earth are RSS and Syndication?

"RSS" (Really Simple Syndication) was developed by Netscape in the late 1990s as a way to serve headlines to users. Most news organizations have RSS feeds: So, for example, I subscribe to the Red Sox news feed on the Boston Globe website: Whenever a news story about the Red Sox was posted, notification appears in my RSS Reader. The KDE Apps feed tells me when new KDE applications have been posted to that site. RSS is particularly popular in the blogging world, where it is used to serve a list of recent blog postings. RSS (and related formats) can be used, though, to serve any sort of list-like information: For example, one could set it up to serve a to-do list or an amazon.com wishlist. (These suggestions are made and explored in Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom, by Ben Hammersley.) Here on PhOnline, RSS is used to provide subscribed users with a list of papers recently posted to the site.

RSS Readers

To do anything with an RSS feed, you really need an RSS reader. There are many, many different readers available for every platform. Perhaps the easiest to use, however, is built into to Firefox web browser. All one needs to do is bookmark an RSS feed (for example, one of the feeds above), and instead of a normal bookmark, one gets a "live bookmark" that appears as a folder, and the items within the folder are the items in the feed, that is, the twenty-five papers most recently posted to PhOnline. But there are many others, and I'll not recommend any particular ones.