Commalg.org offers a few Atom and webcal feeds for you to follow the site’s content. If you already know what a feed is and how to use one, all you need are the links:
- full content Atom feed
- news items Atom feed
- conference announcement Atom feed
- conference calendar webcal feed
Now, what are these things? A feed is a way to find out about updates to a website without having to visit the site in your web browser. The website publishes, along with the web pages you usually view, a file that’s designed to be read by machines rather than people. This process is called “syndication.” Blogs, newspaper websites, amazon.com, and lots of other sites publish feeds. To use them, you “subscribe” to the feed in a “feed reader” or “aggregator.” This is a tool that lets you subscribe to any feeds you want, checks automatically to see when they’re updated, and then displays the updates for you as they arrive. There are two basic flavors of feed readers: standalone programs that run on your computer, and web-based ones.
Atom feeds are a version of what’s called RSS (Rich Site Summary). What is RSS? It’s the most straightforward way to get updates from commalg.org. Here are a couple more links about RSS:
Webcal feeds are specifically for calendar information. They’re designed to work with the Mac program iCal, but also can be imported into web-based calendars like Google Calendar.