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New Website Feature: Use RSS to Get the Latest Evidence from FIRE’s Cases

We are proud to announce the expansion of the RSS feeds offered on FIRE’s website. RSS, or “really simple syndication,” allows us to create feeds that automatically update themselves as soon as new information is posted to the website. By subscribing to these feeds, you can read the latest developments from FIRE without having to check the website constantly. A few web browsers already have built-in RSS capabilities (including Firefox and Safari), but you can also download a separate RSS aggregator to organize your subscriptions. Google and Bloglines offer web-based RSS reader services.

Some months ago, we silently introduced RSS feeds for the blog (“The Torch RSS Feed”), the home page (“FIRE’s Latest RSS Feed”), our listing of news and opinion articles about FIRE (“Media Coverage RSS Feed”), and our press releases (“Press Releases RSS Feed”). These are all listed at the bottom of the blue sidebar on FIRE’s home page. The Torch feed in particular has proved to be popular with our visitors.

But we were just getting started. Last week we brought individual RSS feeds to each of FIRE’s more than 100 cases. If you visit a case’s main page, you will see its corresponding RSS feed linked in the blue sidebar. When you subscribe to the RSS feeds for the cases that interest you the most, you can be sure that you’ll always have the latest information at your fingertips. As new case materials, media coverage, press releases, and other information are posted, that case’s associated RSS feed updates itself automatically.

The RSS feed paints a broader picture of the situation on campus than the press releases alone. For example, within two days after FIRE’s latest case at Arizona State University had gone public, we already posted ten new items (seven case materials and three news articles) to that case page. Of course, these items could not have been mentioned in our press release, since they were posted after we had run it. Before we implemented RSS for cases, you would have needed to know to return to the website. But now, if you subscribe to the RSS feed, the facts come directly to you!

The new RSS feeds are but the latest addition to FIRE’s arsenal of tools designed to expose the state of liberty on ever more campuses across the nation. With FIRE’s Spotlight, The Torch, and now the RSS feeds, you can instantly learn where individual freedoms are threatened—and what FIRE is doing to defend them. The more we can do to hold universities and colleges accountable for illiberal actions and policies, so much the better. After all, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

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