RSS News Feeds

Use our news and calendar feeds to make your internet life easier

Young students learn about ice cores

Subscribe to a feed by clicking its link

News Feeds: ENVS News | ENVS Events | NPR News

iCalendar Feed: ENVS Calendar of Events

RSS in Plain English

4-min video explanation of RSS from CommonCraft

What are News feeds?

Feeds allow you to see when certain websites have added new content... without having to visit the site in your web browser. You can get the latest headlines and video from multiple sites in one place, as soon as they are published. This makes it much easier to stay abreast of changing content for tens to hundreds of sites.

Not all website have feeds. Many do, however, and they often alert you with an orange (or blue) button like that above. Alternatively they provide links with one or more of the following labels: "XML", "RSS", "Atom", "News Feed". All these links and buttons mean the same thing: The site you're viewing has a feed available. The feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people.

Our explanation is modified from BBC and six apart

OK, how do I start using news feeds?

The first thing you need is something called a "news reader", also referred to as a "news aggregator". This is a piece of software that checks the feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications.

Downloadable news reader applications let you store your feeds on your main computer, in the same way that you might download your e-mail using Outlook. They are faster than browser-based news readers. Windows applications include Newz Crawler, FeedDemon, and Awasu. Mac OS X applications include NetNewsWire and Vienna.

Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, but are slower than downloadable applications. Examples include Google Reader, Bloglines, NewsGator, Microsoft Live, and My Yahoo!.

Some Browsers can mimic downloadable applications through their built-in news reading capabilities. These include Firefox, Opera and Safari. Managing a number of feeds is more difficult than the downloadable applications or browser-based software. At least that is the case for late 2006. These capabilities are likely to improve in the future.

Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want it to receive. For example, if you would like the latest ENVS News, simply click the link which appears higher on this page. For some news readers you then just hit a subscribe button. For others you might cut and paste the URL or drag it.

What are iCalendar feeds and how do I use them?

ENVS Events automatically included in your personal calendar
If your computer- or web-based calendaring application supports the iCalendar (.ics) standard then you can easily add our events to it. Programs that support our calendar include CU's web-based CULink calendar, Apple's iCal application, Google Calendar, Facebook, Microsoft Entourage, Mozilla Calendar (including Mozilla Sunbird), Windows Calendar (starting with Vista), and Microsoft Outlook 7+.

For some applications, it's as simple as clicking on our iCalendar feed link below and subscribing.

iCalendar Feed: ENVS Calendar of Events

For CULink, login and then go to Options (upper right) >Calendar > Subscriptions and paste one of the following links into the URL field:
http://instaar.colorado.edu/envs/about/calendar2
http://instaar.colorado.edu/envs/about/calendar.ics
Leave the User field blank. If you get an invalid URL error, try the other link.

For other applications, try the CULink instructions in the sentence above... and if that doesn't work, consult your application's documentation.