Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 15:22:00 +0530 From: VYASAMOORTHY /IKP/HYD Dear Friends: This has nothing to do with RSS connected with BJP. I desire to bring to your attention about RSS feeds available from websites. Recently a Technology called RSS (=Really Simple Syndication) is available. Many websites offering news items also provide what is called an RSS feed. New Indian Express is the first such Indian Newspaper to offer RSS feeds. RSS feed is usually an xml file. This file has an URL (address of the page on the website). For instance the RSS feed for Indian Express is available at: http://www.xpressindia.com/syndications/ei.xml At the end-user's PC, one has to install a small program generally called RSS Aggregator. Many RSS readers (aggregators) are available for free download and Amphetadesk is one of them. After installing Amphetadesk and invoking it, one has to enter the URL of the XML page in this program. Thereafter, Amphetadesk automatically downloads frequently the XML page (RSS feed). We will then get on our desktop the latest news brought to us regularly every three hours. If we have entered five news channels then we would have latest news from five different channels. All of them have the URL of the actual news item plus a short abstract. In this way one can get himself updated easily with latest news from different newspapers (or web resources or portals) of his choice. Several sites give directories of available RSS feeds. www.feedster.com is such a directory. www.disobey.com the site that provides Amphetadesk also gives its own long list of several thousand RSS feeds. RSS feeds are also called Channels. There is a provision to display constantly updated news pages on your website using this technology. There are easy methods of providing such 'automatically updated' news services on your website too using this pull technology: html code to be inserted in your html page are shown in concerned websites offering RSS feeds. I suggest librarians to make use of this technology to offer better value added services to their clients. *Dr.P.Vyasamoorthy, Advisor, Virtual Information Centre *ICICI Knowledge Park, Turkapalli Village, Shameerpet Mandal, RR District, Hyderabad 500078 INDIA *Ph: +91(40) 2348 0053; Fax:+91(40) 2348 0007 Ph. Res: +91(40) 2784 6631 *Website: http://www.vic-ikp.info and http://www.iciciknowledgepark.com HAVE YOU TRIED OUR TRANSLATION SERVICES?