What is a Science RSS Feed?

by David Bradley

Executive summary

Just click the big orange RSS button to subscribe to our newsfeed and read Sciencebase without even visiting the site!

RSS and Newsfeeds - the Details

The Sciencebase science RSS (really simple syndication) newsfeed helps you keep up to date with news in chemistry, life sciences, materials, medicine, nanotechnology, and physics as featured in webzines and blogs to which freelance science writer David Bradley contributes. You subscribe (FREE) or aggregate the newsfeed (which is just a simple XML file*)and it delivers the headlines straight to your newsreader without you having to check back with the site to find out what's new. Your newsreader might be a standalone program like Amphetadesk, your My Yahoo page, the active bookmarks system in Firefox, or a news and blogs account you can create for Thunderbird. Just click an orange RSS icon to subscribe for free now.

How do I read an RSS feed?

You can install a piece of software known as a news aggregator and then click the orange buttons on this page to trigger the news aggregator to subscribe. The program then downloads any updates automatically and brings you clickable headlines and introductory text. Search Google for news aggregators to find the popular software, there are lots of freeware tools out there. You can also subscribe to the Sciencebase RSS by adding us to your blogroll at any of the dozens of blog sites like newsgator, bloglines, technorati etc. Click any of the buttons below to add the Sciencebase RSS to your favourite newsreader or choose the MultiRSS button to gain access to almost every blog site out there:

| | | |

News Aggregation Without Aggravation

The sciencebase newsfeed currently gathers news from Elemental Discoveries, SpectroscopyNOW, Reactive Reports, and Spotlight, the Sciencebase Blog...

A Flaming Alternative - Firefox

To read the sciencebase RSS in Mozilla Firefox open the sciencebase Home page and click the little orange square that appears towards the bottom right in the browser status bar (it's in the address bar in the latest version of Firefox) to "subscribe". This creates an active bookmark in your favorites folder/bookmarks, which automatically grabs the latest Sciencebase headlines when you browse to it.

RSS Thundering Along

Thunderbird mail client with the Forumzilla extension makes reading RSS feeds as simple as downloading your email. Just add our feed address http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/feed to your list of RSS feeds.

Yahoo! My!

You can also add the sciencebase RSS to your Yahoo homepage by clicking: My Yahoo! which subscribes you without needing any new software. That way you get science news in the same place as your Yahoo daily headlines, TV listings, email etc.

MSN! My!

Similarly, you can now add the sciencebase rss newsfeed to your My MSN page too.

Google It!

You can just as easily add us to your Google reader by clicking this link.

Other Sciencebase Feeds

The Sciencebase content management system allows you to pick and choose a feed tailored to your particular interests. Check out the Sciencebase Science Blog page to see our available categories. Then, simply add in the particular category of interest to the feed URL in the following format: http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/category/chemistry/feed This feed will grab just the chemistry headlines. Other categories include: astronomy, bio, physics, health, environment, science, and education.

Syndication, That's The Name Of The Game

SCIENCEBOARD.NET, 2START.CO.UK, PSIGATE, ARILABS, and many other sites already syndicate the sciencebase science newsfeed in this way.

RSS FAQ

If you'd like to know more about RSS, XML newsfeeds etc try Yahoo RSS directory FAQ.

RSS RDF XML ATOM - What?

*It's acronym city out there: RSS stands for "Really Simply Syndication", "RDF Site Summary" or "Rich Site Summary" (and probably a dozen other things depending on your technical stance and whether you understand that there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't). RDF itself stands for "Resource Description Framework". XML is eXtensible Markup Language (there's also CML - Chemical Markup Language, and a whole host of others). If I remember rightly from my days on the SGML (standard generalized markup language) working group at the RSC (royal society of chemistry) when we were looking into the DTD (document type definition) used by the ACS (american chemical society), it's a standardized text format derived from SGML...I could go on, and frequently do. I don't think ATOM actually stands for anything, it's just ATOM!