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Universalis
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Saturday 11 October 2008
Saturday of week 27 of the year
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Universalis by web feed
Web feeds, often called "RSS feeds" because of the name of one of
the popular feed formats, are a way of presenting changing content in a format
that can be understood by a computer. That sounds rather abstract, so here is
an example:
- A news site regularly publishes new news items for people to read on the
Web. The site also publishes a web feed: this gives the most recent items
in a machine-readable format.
- Live bookmarks: If your browser understands web feeds (the
latest versions of Opera and Mozilla Firefox do; Internet Explorer 7
will) then you will see a little feed icon
in the address bar. Clicking on it creates a link (Firefox calls them "Live
Bookmarks") that points to the summary. Your browser regularly checks
to see if a new item has been published, and warns you in some way if it has.
You don't need to keep on visiting a page to see if anything new has appeared
on it.
- Browser plug-ins: Various plug-ins are available for some
browsers that can do extra things for you, such as display a summary list
of recent items or an elegantly formatted page that displays them all together.
Sage Reader for Firefox
is an excellent example.
- Feed readers: You can also install self-sufficient feed
readers that are independent of your browser. Some are simple, some are very
sophisticated, but they all let you combine news from various sources in one
place. They don't depend on the browser understanding feeds, so you can carry
on using Internet Explorer 6 if you want.
- Syndicating the content: "Syndication" means
incorporating the items from a web feed into a web page of your own, so that
your web page changes whenever a new item is published. If you have an account
on My Yahoo!, you can customise your home page to incorporate syndicated items.
An increasing number of other service providers are doing the same thing,
and if you have your own web site then tools are available for incorporating
external feeds into it.
- Email: You can subscribe to a feed-to-email
service that sends you new items by email as they appear, so you don't
have to use the Web at all.
Available Universalis feeds
We have programmed Universalis to behave like the news site in the example
we've just given. We're providing just a few feeds until we know what people
are really going to be using them for. (For the technically minded, all these
feeds are in Atom 1.0 format, which all modern feed readers can understand).
Don't click on any of the links just yet until you've read
the description in the following section.
- Mass Readings (today)
- Readings for today. Because "Today" means different things in
different parts of the world (for instance, Thursday evening in America is
Friday morning in Europe) you may need to check that Universalis knows which
time zone you are in before you try using this link. If the time where you
are is not Sat 8:19 pm then visit the Time Zones page
and select your time zone from the list.
- Mass Readings (3 days)
- Readings for yesterday, today and tomorrow. This wider range means that
you don't have to worry about time zones.
- Weekly summary
- The feast of the day, plus links to the Hours and Mass readings, for a week
ahead.
- 3-day summary
- The same, but for yesterday, today and tomorrow only.
Using these links
- If you are using a modern browser then simply look at the address bar of
this page and you should see a feed icon
next to the page address. Click on it, and your browser will give you some
options for which feed to use and how to use it.
- Other tools such as feed readers may also be able to "auto-discover"
the Universalis feeds if you give them the address of this page.
- If you are ever asked directly for the address of a feed, then right-click
on one of the links in the list of available Universalis feeds, select "Copy
Shortcut" from the menu that pops up, and then use Ctrl+V to paste the
address into the program that is asking for it.
- If you have installed a feed reader program on your PC then you may simply
be able to click on one of the links directly and the feed reader will receive
the link from your browser, but it depends on the program and the browser:
if you get a page of nonsense, press the Back button.
See also
- Banners
- If you are running a web site then you may like to incorporate graphical
banners that display the feast of the day and link to Universalis. Here is
an example:
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