What is a News Feed? What is RSS?

A feed lists regularly-updated content from a website, most commonly news and event information. The feed gets updated whenever new content of that type is published to the website. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) refers to a family of feed formats.

Web users can subscribe to these feeds using a variety of feed readers. Some readers take the form of software, while others integrate with your web browser. Some websites such as Google and Yahoo! let you subscribe to feeds from your personalized homepage.

You can set your feed reader to scan for updates as often as you want (e.g. every five minutes, once an hour, etc.). The key is that you'll be notified whenever there's new website content—you don't have to keep going back to that website to check for new content or hit the ‹Refresh› button in your browser.

The feed items contain headlines and brief summaries of the new content, along with links to the full story on the originating website.

How do I know a feed is available from a website?

Look for the RSS icon, pictured on the right of this page. 

What feeds does Denison make available?

News:

• TheDEN: http://www.denison.edu/theden/feed/
• Big Red Athletics: http://denisonbigred.com/rss/index

Events:

• Featured Campus Events: http://www.denison.edu/rss/events/featured
• Big Red Athletics (Schedule): http://denisonbigred.com/composite?print=rss
• Alumni Events: http://denison.imodules.com/controls/cms_v2/components/rss/rss.aspx?sid=1336&gid=1&calcid=664&page_id=13
• Student Activities Events: https://orgsync.com/calendar/org/rss/387220/ce5814b99fa48e7605f69c30d260ec665c90f62b?org=10255

Other:

• Employment Opportunities: https://employment.denison.edu/all_jobs.atom

With TheDEN's feeds, you can get even more advanced. Let's say that you want to be notified whenever a story on biology is published on TheDEN. Simply add "/tag/biology/" between "theden" and "feed" in the URL above and point your feed reader to that updated address. Now, you'll be notified as soon as a biology story goes up on TheDEN. You can find a list of story tags on TheDEN homepage (in the tag cloud) as well as at the bottom of every story.

• Biology Example: http://www.denison.edu/theden/tag/biology/feed/

How do I subscribe to these feeds?

Simply point your feed reader to the URLs listed above.

What are some of the most popular feed readers?