RSS Information

Available Feeds The Today Sheet Cars Furniture Help Wanted (tutoring, proofreading) Housing (apartments, rooms for rent, roommates) Lost & Found Miscellaneous Ride Board Sitters (baby, pet, house) Study Guides Textbooks (buy, sell, trade) Tickets

What is RSS?

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Think of it as a distributable "What's New." Originated by UserLand in 1997 and subsequently used by Netscape to fill channels for Netcenter, RSS has evolved into a very popular way of sharing content (including the BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney, Forbes, Motley Fool, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, ZDNet, and more).

RSS feeds bring automatically updated information straight to your desktop. You can monitor news, job listings, personals, and classifieds. More and more sites offer feeds, which you can identify by a small button that says either RSS or XML. However, if you click one of these links, you will most likely get a page full of code in your browser. To properly read the feed, you need an RSS reader.

Law Center's RSS Feeds

The Law Center provides an increasing number of feeds from various departments and websites. Please check this page for updated list of RSS feeds. Also, if you encounter an RSS or RSS SYNDICATE button on a page, this means that the content is available in RSS format.

Choosing an Aggregator

There are many RSS aggregators, and three comprehensive lists of them can be found at Abbe Normal’s Weblog/Wiki, News Aggregators Directory, and Lockergnome’s RSS Resources. What aggregator you should use depends on your own needs. Often it is best to try several out before deciding which you prefer. Needs which differ include how many computers you use, how many feeds you read, how you’d like to read the feeds, etc.

If, for example, you use multiple computers, then you probably want to use either an online aggregator such as Bloglines, or an aggregator that allows you to synchronize across multiple computers, such as NewsGator. Some people find it convenient to read RSS feeds in a program that they are already using. For example, My Yahoo! has an RSS module, and NewsGator integrates into Microsoft Outlook. Some people prefer an aggregator that shows new items as a news ticker on their desktop, while others prefer a full-fledged application to read RSS feeds in. Many aggregators mentioned here are free to use; however, there are some that must be purchased.