XML News Feeds

XML feeds are an efficient way of gathering information from the Internet. XML is written to convey information without any of the formatting that clutters typical web pages.  XML is a relatively new technology and has not yet been widely adopted by the general public, but a few leading news organizations already support this technology. NPR, BBC, Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, Yahoo, and Reuters all supply free XML news feeds.  XML feeds are identified by the standard orange XML icon (seen below) and are growing in popularity across the Internet.  My website also has an XML feed, which can be accessed here:

  
The use of XML feeds requires a news reader.  The news reader I use is Sage. It is an extension for Mozilla's Firefox web browser.  I tried a few other news readers (such as FeedReader and BottomFeeder) and found the Sage extension to work much better than these stand-alone programs. FeedReader, BottomFeeder, and other open source programs I tried had bugs. Sage, on the other hand, works extremely well.  Additionally, Sage incorporates flawlessly with Firefox, allowing seamless navigation to articles of interest.  Sage allows a great deal of customization, through modifying the CSS template.  However, it does not offer filters and other more advanced features.

To make accessing the articles more efficient, I also use two other Firefox extensions:  BugMeNot, to quickly and anonymously log into news sites, and Adblock, to remove advertisements that clutter news web pages.

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View my article on BugMeNot.