feeds.ejhp.net : Frequently Asked Questions
This website hosts a growing collection of newsfeeds, listing newly published articles on various websites (mainly covering UK politics). Items are listed in reverse chronological order - i.e. the most recent items are at the top of the list. The list is available in several formats (see question 4 below). The original newsfeed was a listing of the 25 most recent items to appear on the website of the 10 Downing Street Media Centre.
Well, originally I wanted a way to keep up to date with the transcripts of the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman (PMOS), but the page on which these listings appear isn't always kept totally up-to-date. To solve this problem I created a script to check the website every 30 minutes (via the search facility) and hence produce an up-to-date listing. Then I decided that it would be more useful for other people to have a listing of all items from the Media Centre, not just the PMOS transcripts. After that it rather snowballed...
Nope, I'm a member of no political party. I just wanted to read the PMOS transcripts, partly to keep up to date with current events, and partly because whoever writes the transcripts has a rather dry wit (although this seems to have been in abeyance since the start of Gulf War II).
At the moment, you can view it as a normal web-page (here), or you can subscribe to the RSS newsfeed (newsfeeds are available as RSS version 0.91 and version 1.0). If you use the web-page, you will have to manually check back every so often to see what's changed. If you use the RSS feeds, your RSS-viewer should automatically update the headlines every 30 minutes.
The term "RSS" is an abbreviation of Rich Site Summary (or Really Simple Syndication, or various other similar names). It's a simple way of distributing information about new articles. RSS newsfeeds can be viewed in a variety of dedicated RSS viewers. For a very brief, non-technical introduction to RSS, see Voidstar. For a partial list of RSS-viewers, see another bit of Voidstar. Or you could read an excellent and very comprehensive introduction to RSS.
When a consensus emerges on ECHO, I'll create ECHO feeds as well as RSS feeds.
At the moment there's no provision for email updates. There probably won't be email updates any time soon, since I don't want to have the hassle of running multiple mailing lists. Sorry!