ENVS Program Announcements
ENVS Opportunities
What is RSS?
ENVS Webpage Feeds
Delicious Feeds
Configuring MyLC
Configuring Google Reader

ENVS Program Announcements

All official announcements regarding the Environmental Studies Program will be posted via this Moodle forum. (You can also access the forum via the ENVS Majors/Minors Moodle page here.) Students enrolled in ENVS courses, students who have already declared a major or minor in ENVS, prospective majors, ENVS alumni, and affiliated staff and faculty are automatically enrolled in this course. Membership in this Moodle forum is mandatory, since it is the primary means of delivering crucial ENVS-specific information.

ENVS Opportunities

Information regarding any internship, employment, and scholarship opportunities of interest to ENVS students will be posted in this Moodle forum. (You can also access the forum via the ENVS Majors/Minors Moodle page here.) ENVS is working in conjunction with the Center for Community and Career Engagement to make this forum a one-stop shop for available opportunities for students. Membership in this Moodle forum is voluntary.

What is RSS?

RSS, which stands for "Really Simple Syndication," is a standardized format used to publish frequently updated web content: blog entries, news articles, etc. Most webpages now offer specialized RSS feeds that allow users to read content by means of an application called an RSS reader or aggregator; MyLC, Google Reader, and all of the big web browsers can be used to subscribe to ("aggregate") and view ("read") web content. Now, instead of the user getting information by hopping from site to site, the specific information the user wants is automatically delivered as soon as its published, and collected in one place. Amazing!

The user subscribes to an RSS feed by entering the feed's URL into a reader (look for the RSS icon: ). The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read those feeds.
While the RSS format is standardized, each website handles its feeds differently. A website with infrequent updates—such as a personal blog—might just have one feed for all new information, while bigger sites might have a wide selection of feeds for various types of information; some sites make their feeds easy to find while others tend to make the user hunt for them. For example, let's say you're a frequent reader of the political/culture journal The Huffington Post. At the bottom of its homepage you'll find a link to an RSS overview page which describes the various types of feeds its offers and the URLs for those feeds. One option would be to subscribe to a "full" feed of everything they publish throughout the site, while another feed would offer just the "Latest News" or "Most Popular Stories," etc. Once you grab the feed URL it's time to configure it in your RSS reader, described below.

ENVS Webpage Feeds

Here is a simple, step by step explanation for setting up your RSS feeds:

1. Choose an RSS reader: MyLC is easy to use, but GoogleReader or the one built into your browser are generally more sophisticated.
   
2. Choose what kinds of information you want to receive from ENVS; we suggest All ENVS News (so you'll receive everything ENVS sends out), but if that is too much information you can add any combination of the more specific feeds.
3. If you would like to see when new items are added to any of the ENVS Delicious databases, add the appropriate feed by following the directions below.
4. Feel free to add feeds from your favorite news websites or blogs too.
5. That's it! Double check to make sure everything is working properly. If you have any issues send an email to envs@lclark.edu.

RSS feeds are a component of how we communicate in ENVS. Set up your MyLC reader at www.lclark.edu/mylc to minimally include the following by adding the RSS links below:

LCENVS News: The ENVS News feed (to receive changes to the ENVS webpage) 

 LCENVS Delicious: The LCENVS Delicious feed (where we share online resources)

 LCENVS Blog: The ENVS blog (where we share our adventures and reflections)

There are lots of other feeds you may wish to add as well; read on for details.

Delicious Feeds

With Delicious, you can use RSS feeds to stay appraised of any new information added into the research resources databases: lcenvs, lcenvsgis, and lcenvsres. For example, let's say you're doing a research project that focuses on land use in Australia, and you'd like to know if someone adds something to Delicious. Simply build a search query (i.e., the australia and landuse tags) in lcenvs, then click on the RSS Feed for These Bookmarks icon at the bottom of the page:

Once you've subscribed to that dedicated feed, any new items which are added into it will appear in your feed aggregator. You no longer need to hunt around in Delicious for new information...it comes straight to you! This method breaking down large amounts of information into tags, and then delivering that "stream" of information to a user via an RSS feed, is fast becoming a primary mechanism for managing information.

Configuring MyLC

As part of its recent website redesign, Lewis and Clark College has developed its own simplified RSS reader called MyLC which is tied to your LC email login name and password. MyLC is a very simple to use RSS reader that lets students add in as many feeds as they'd like, both externally or from within various parts of the Lewis and Clark website. It's easy to set up and use.

1. Go to the Lewis and Clark homepage and click on the MyLC link on the right-hand side. You will be prompted to log in using your LC email name and password.
2. Once logged in, you'll be taken to your MyLC main page. Click on the Edit Feeds button and you will be presented with an option to add feeds from a suggested list of internal and external websites. (The three required ENVS feeds noted above are automatically listed under Suggested Feeds!) If you would like to subscribe to one of these, simply click on the green plus sign and that feed will be added into your MyLC reader.
3. You also have the option to enter your own external RSS links. Simply copy and paste a desired feed's URL into this field and click the Add button; that feed will be added into your MyLC. For example, let's say you want to subscribe to The Huffington Post's "most popular stories" feed. Simply copy the feed URL (see the section above on where to find this) and paste it into the Or Enter an RSS Link Below field in MyLC:
   
4. Click the Add button and, voila, you've added The Huffington Post's "Most Popular Stories" feed into MyLC. Now, as soon as The Huffington Post publishes new content which they tag as a "Most Popular Story," you'll now automatically receive it in your MyLC reader! This same process can be repeated over and over for as many feeds as you'd like.
5. To read The Huffington Post feed, simply click on the feed's title listed under the Feeds label on the center-right-hand side; that particular feed title will become bolded and the feeds will appear as individual story titles identified by title and source. Each of those links will take you directly to that particular story in The Huffington Post. To hide The Huffington Post feed, simply click on the feed title again and MyLC will hide it.
   

MyLC is a very simple way to get feeds, but there are some limitations. For example, you'll notice that even though you click through to and read a particular story, the link will remain in MyLC. Feeds are updated in MyLC when the source publisher (in this case, The Huffington Post) decides to update the feed with new information. In addition, there's really no way to permanently store links you'd like to hold onto, or share them with your friends, or organize multiple feeds into directories, etc. If you'd like a little more power in how you can configure/store/share items, you may consider using a more robust reader such as Google Reader.

Configuring Google Reader

Google Reader -- which you already have access to if you have a Google email account -- allows the user to create directories and sub-directories (see on the left-hand side in the screenshot below) in order to better organize feeds. For example, you may decide to create one directory that contains feeds from various Lewis and Clark sources, one directory for international news, one directory for feeds from your friends' blogs, and one directory with feeds from environmentally-themed websites like Grist and Treehugger:

In addition to being able to organize feeds, Google Reader offers a number of features not found in MyLC. For example, Google Reader shows the user how many new (i.e., unread) items are available in any given feed. Another great thing about Google Reader is that the interface gives the user a "preview" of the individual story which will often include an image, author name, and short excerpt; this gives the user the opportunity to decide whether or not it's a link they'd like to check out. And unlike MyLC, once a story is read (or marked as read), it will no longer appear as a new story in Google Reader. Users also have the opportunity to "star" particular stories that they'd like to save and to set up "share" networks with friends. For more help, check out this video on adding feeds to Google Reader.

In addition to MyLC and readers like Google Reader, most major web browsers (e.g., Firefox, Safari) also have RSS built into them and allow users to set up a feed just like they would a browser bookmark. Simply click on the RSS icon in the URL window and your browser will ask you if you'd like to include it in your bookmarks. The feeds you subscribe to now appear with your other bookmarks; individual news stories will be updated and will appear as titled links. Whatever type of RSS reader you choose to use, it's imperative you subscribe to the ENVS feeds to keep on top of ENVS-related information. These feeds are described further in the next section.

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