Newsfeeds are some of the more useful features of many websites, albeit frequently underappreciated by those who see feeds as just an odd-ball bit of text. A typical newsfeed contains a wealth of information about a site and the articles on it: who manages the site, the descriptions used for search engines, the primary titles and images of articles used by social media when you provide a link. Newsfeeds are used by news readers to notify a person when a given site changes its content, making it possible to read stories independent of the web site itself.
Data Science Central makes extensive use of feeds. All of the DSC news feeds are given as XML documents, though the specific format of the document changes based upon what kind of feed is requested. The base feed for the site is given as:
https://www.datasciencecentral.com/feed/formatwhere format is shown in the following table:
| Format Name | Format URL | Description |
|---|---|---|
| /feed | RSS 2.0 Feed. This is the default format if no format is given. | |
| rss2 | /feed/rss2 | RSS 2.0 Feed. This is the same format as rss. |
| rdf | /feed/rdf | This uses the RDF RSS feed format built around RDF-XML. |
| rss | /feed/rss | RSS 0.91 Feed. This is the older RSS format, largely obsolete now. |
| atom | /feed/atom | Atom 1.0 Feed. This uses the more up to date atom feed, which contains additional metadata. |
So, if you wish to get the Atom Feed for the site, you’d use
https://www.datasciencecentral.com/feed/atomThe same goes for category pages, which add the feed designator after the category URL. For instance, you can get the atom feed of the latest digital disruption articles via the URL:
https://www.datasciencecentral.com/category/business-topics/digital-disruption/feed/atom/Similarly, you can go up to a section header (the menu at the top of the homepage) and see all articles published in that section by date, for instance, see all business-topics:
https://www.datasciencecentral.com/category/business-topics/feed/You can combine feeds and search. For instance, the following URL will give you all articles in the digital disruption category that include the “risk” keyword:
https://www.datasciencecentral.com/category/business-topics/digital-disruption/feed/atom?s=riskFinally, you can also see articles by a particular author using the same strategy. For instance, to get the atom listing of all articles by “Kurt Cagle” you’d use the following:
https://www.datasciencecentral.com/author/kurtcagle/feed/atom/Feel free to use our newsfeeds on your own sites, as long as Data Science Central and Tech Target are credited.
