BRYN MAWR NOW BLASTS OFF INTO THE BLOGOSPHERE

Bryn Mawr Now enters the blogosphere today by offering its first RSS feed. The devoted reader can now subscribe to the publication and be notified of top headlines each week through an RSS reader, or news aggregator.

Aggregators (also called RSS readers, feed readers, feed aggregators or sometimes news readers) have been described as "personal newspapers." They can save Web users time and effort by consolidating newly posted information from the user's favorite Web sources in a single place. At regular intervals, the aggregator checks each subscribed site for new content and notifies the user when new information has been posted.

RSS (experts differ on whether the letters stand for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) gathers and disseminates information about a given Web site by means of a Web page called a news or Web feed. The feed page uses a standard format based on XML (extensible markup language) to identify headlines, brief summaries and links to stories, along with some information about the publisher. News aggregators interpret this information and present it to the reader.

Our feed is linked from each page with an orange XML icon. To subscribe, a reader clicks on the icon, which leads to a page of code (the feed page). Then the URL of this feed page must be copied and pasted into the appropriate place in an aggregator.

An aggregator can be a program that is downloaded to the user's desktop or a Web-based service used through any standard browser; many free aggregators of both types are available. Aggregator features are also built into portal sites such as My Yahoo and Google. My Yahoo will deliver headlines to an e-mail account. An especially attractive option is the RSS reader built into Mozilla Thunderbird, a free, open-source e-mail program that presents e-mail and news feeds in the same window. Bryn Mawr Computing Services recommends Thunderbird and provides instructions for downloading and configuring it at http://www.brynmawr.edu/computing/docs/documentation.shtml. For a general discussion of RSS and a video illustrating the use of an aggregator, go to the April 25, 2005, podcast of "Click and Double-Click," available at http://www.brynmawr.edu/etc/click/index.shtml.

In the process of preparing Bryn Mawr Now's front page for the feed summary, we have made a few format changes that were suggested by Web usability and accessibility standards. Headlines are no longer displayed in all capital letters, and each headline is the link to its story, replacing the "read more" button at the bottom of each article summary.

Web Applications Programmer Mike Zarro is enthusiastic about this foray into XML. "We're looking at several ways we can use XML to deliver information in a variety of forms that are more convenient for people who use the Bryn Mawr Web site," he says. "It allows us to separate the content itself from the style or format in which it is presented. This is the beginning of a move toward drawing information from an authoritative source and presenting it in several different places on the site and elsewhere. This way we can eliminate duplication of effort as well as a lot of the transcription errors that are inevitable when information is copied and recopied. XML will help us move toward a Bryn Mawr Web site that is both easier to maintain and more accurate."

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