UC Berkeley News Brief
UC Berkeley news comes to you
BERKELEY – Can't always make it to the NewsCenter every day for a fresh dose of campus news? With a new syndication service, you can now get UC Berkeley headlines on your computer or website as soon as they're online.
The NewsCenter has begun publishing headlines and summaries of campus news stories as an RSS feed, or channel. This free feed can be plugged into a news aggregator to display Berkeley news in customizable form on a user's computer. Several news aggregators are available for free downloads on the Web; search Google for "RSS newsreader" for a selection. Then click on the orange RSS button at the bottom of the NewsCenter to access the feed.
In addition, with only a few lines of code, webmasters across campus (and beyond) can include UC Berkeley headlines and story summaries on any web page, customized to meet their needs. The NewsCenter feed is already in use on IS&T's iNews site and on Berkeley newshound Tim Bishop's Berkeleyblog.com. Contact NewsCenter editor Steve McConnell for more details and the necessary script.
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication (depending on whom you ask). It's an XML-based format that combines links and text in a way that can be easily distributed and interpreted by other programs. The NewsCenter's RSS feed was developed with the invaluable assistance of Bishop, a local entrepreneur, self-taught programmer and science writer, who created and generously shared the original scripts that made the channel possible.
The scripts to insert the NewsCenter RSS feed into web pages are based on code from Alan Levine of Maricopa Community Colleges.