RSS Feeds
The Christian Science Monitor make RSS available to you, to help you receive automatic updates on the news.
More about RSS.
The easiest aggregators are web-based:
Website Sections
Blogs
Terrorism & Security: A daily update on the big picture, rounding up links, perspective, and analysis. We scour the Web for important stories from new and traditional news sources around the world.
In Focus: Staff Photographer John Nordell talks about his photos, and publishes some of his out-takes.
Notebook: South Asia: Monitor staff reporters file occasional dispatches on life in New Delhi and an intriguing region.
Notebook: Iraq: Monitor staff reporters file occasional dispatches on life and reporting from Baghdad.
Notebook: Africa: Monitor Africa Correspondent Abe McLaughlin's periodic journal from his base in Johannesburg.
SciTechblog: A blog about technology, science, and other cool stuff.
Weekend Zone:
New! The editors of the weekend section offer notes on the leisure side of life.
Special Sections
Ethical Investing
Podcast. A monthly interview show with SRI professionals, plus occasional articles on socially-responsible investing.
What is RSS?
An RSS file is a list of headlines that can be read by another program or website. RSS is usually said to stand for "Really Simple Syndication" because it is relatively easy to implement and use.
Programs that know what to do with RSS files are called "news aggregators," and there are a lot of them. Most are very easy to use. They all let you read headlines from dozens or hundreds of news sites at one time.
There are three kinds of aggregators: aggregator web sites, web browsers that act as aggregators, and stand-alone aggregator software that you install on your computer. Once you have an aggregator, simply click on the RSS icon () associated with any of the feeds above. It will take you to a page where you can add the RSS feed to any of the most popular aggregators with one more click. Unfortunately, this method does not work yet for all of our Blog feeds.
Available news aggregators
The easiest way to subscribe to RSS feeds is with an online aggregator.
NewsGator lets you read online or in your e-mail software (add your feeds here) while Bloglines offers a very slick interface. My Feedster marries an aggregator to an RSS search engine and Oddpost (for Windows) is a paid web-based e-mail service that includes a built-in aggregator.
Yahoo! lets you add RSS feeds to your personalized page. To add any feed with two clicks, go to our
My Yahoo! help page.
MSN,
AOL, and
Google now let you do the same.
Some popular downloadable aggregators are
FeedDemon (for Windows),
NetNewsWire (for Mac),
Radio (for Windows or Mac),
KlipFolio (for Windows - you can download the
special klip file),
NewsWatcher (for Windows XP),
NewzCrawler (for Windows), and
Shrook (for Mac OS 10).
Pluck integrates right into your browser.
Other software packages that work only with Windows and require Microsoft's .NET to be installed on your PC (you probably have it if you have Windows XP, but if you have to ask, you probably don't want to check) are:
VoxLite,
Wildgrape News Desk,
SharpReader,
BlogExpress, and
RSS Bandit (open source).
If you do want to install new software, you might try the
Firefox Web browser, which lets you save RSS feeds as "Live Bookmarks" that update regularly (the
Sage extension makes Firefox a more useful aggregator). The
Opera browser integrates support for RSS feeds into its email reader.
Other interesting RSS applications: a ticker called
Enewsbar gives you scrolling headlines at the top or bottom of your screen (Windows and IE required);
nntp//rss lets you read RSS files in Outlook Express or any other newsgroup-reading software (java required); and
ToolButton adds a toolbar to your browser, with all the headlines for a site under a button.
Squeet will send you an email when the feed is updated, as will
Yahoo! Alerts. Another free service,
immedi.at, will send you an IM with a link to new stories.
For more information on the implications and uses of RSS, you can read these articles from the
Online Journalism Review and the
American Press Institute. For more on using and creating RSS feeds, turn to this
tutorial from the Utah State Government. Another useful and extensive list of RSS resources is at
LockerGnome.
Copyright Notice
RSS files © Copyright 2007 The Christian Science Monitor. These files are offered to individuals and non-commercial organizations only. Newspapers, magazines, and other commercial websites wishing to use Monitor RSS files, please contact our syndication staff.
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