BBC News site offers syndication feeds

Written by Adrian Holovaty on September 3, 2002

IMPORTANT UPDATE, June 24, 2003: Even more BBC RSS feeds have been released. See how to access them.

IMPORTANT UPDATE, Sept. 9: I've been told many of these feeds will not work for much longer. I've bolded the feeds that will remain working. (The rest of the original blog entry will remain untouched for posterity's sake.)

Via Danny O'Brien: The BBC News site is offering a beta version of official RSS feeds, which syndicate headlines and short descriptions of stories. (Here's the BBC's announcement, which says "XML and RSS feeds will be available over the coming months.") Other blogs named four of the feeds, but I did some digging and found a slew of others:

Regional feeds

Entertainment feeds

Education feeds

Business feeds

Other feeds

This is a smart move on the BBC's part. It means increased traffic and increased visibility for news.bbc.co.uk, because users are able to syndicate BBC headlines to their own sites and read syndicated content via an RSS reader. (Here's more RSS info.) Yes, it was possible to manually create an RSS feed from that site before, but having an official feed is significantly less troublesome. It's always refreshing to witness a news site that has a clue, technologically.

Comments

Posted by anonymous on March 27, 2003, at 9:26 p.m.:

useful - they are still working today.

I use them as the summary page in ximian evolution

Posted by anonymous on July 18, 2003, at 10:37 a.m.:

they have stopped working today

Posted by anonymous on July 21, 2003, at 10:35 p.m.:

They're working fine today.

Posted by anonymous on September 11, 2003, at 8:40 a.m.:

Thanks for this info, and updates!

Posted by Russ on January 4, 2004, at 6:35 p.m.:

Yep their still working fine!

Posted by Donal on February 2, 2004, at 5:18 p.m.:

The feed you labeled United States is actually for the whole of The Americas, and not just the USA.

Posted by anonymous on March 18, 2004, at 3:37 p.m.:

Can't get any feed on soccer from BBC with this poor thing?

Posted by Chris on March 27, 2004, at 10:28 p.m.:

I opened these directly in Konqueror, and got an XML parsing error - but nuts to that. I want it in Ximian Evolution. Let's see if IT likes them. :)

Posted by Toni on April 12, 2004, at 9:40 a.m.:

I like RSS feed, but I wonder if BBC will make other services available in RSS (such as their services in other languages; Albanian etc.)

Posted by Xor on August 2, 2004, at 4:36 a.m.:

Thanks for this info

Posted by Stephen on September 14, 2004, at 10:54 a.m.:

I opened these directly in Konqueror, and got an XML parsing error - but nuts to that. I want it in Ximian Evolution. Let's see if IT likes them.

Posted by Henry Gilbert on October 2, 2004, at 3:29 a.m.:

thanks a lot.

Same here I use it on my Evolution-1.4 feed.

In fact had to downgrade from Evolution-1.5 (which omits feeds) AND change my Linux Distro (back to Mandrake that includes evo-1.4) just to get my nice feeds back :)

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