_{-- Delivered by Feed43 service}

Palit's RTX 2080 Super Gaming Pro OC is a new variant with a triple-slot, triple-fan cooler, to replace their dual-fan designs. It delivers solid temperatures and noise levels. At $720, the card is priced very reasonably, yet includes a factory overclock, idle-fan-stop, and backplate.... [PCSTATS]

Wireless AD networks came and went without as much as a buzz in the consumer space, and yet there is more here to see before completely dismissing it. Millitronic certainly agrees, with their HIVE wireless docking station able to connect a laptop to an external display wirelessly at low latency, while adding some more tricks on top.... [PCSTATS]

AMD just announced today a design win in conjunction with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), win which it will be providing the hardware powering the El Capitan exascale-class supercomputer. What caught our eye about this announcement was not the compute performance -- which will be enormous ... [PCSTATS]

Is the USB-C Pro Dock from CalDigit the best bang for your buck? Join us as we investigate in our review."... [PCSTATS]

OWC channels the Mercury Elite lineup with the Elite Pro to offer its storage driven dock solution. Here's our review."... [PCSTATS]

The Corsair Scimitar RGB Elite is a mouse that offers plenty of buttons, turns heads with its MMO and MOBA gaming performance, and excellent build quality.... [PCSTATS]

The rewards for offering a high-performance flagship motherboard on the TRX40 platform are clear. Vendors are all competing at price points well above �600 which culminates in motherboard options filled to the brim with the features that almost anybody could wish for. ASUS� ROG Zenith II Extreme was no exception to that point. However, ASUS has tak... [PCSTATS]

"When it comes to mini-ITX AMD X570 motherboards there are only a handful to choose from. Today we are checking out ASRock�s offering which comes in the form of the X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3. We first saw the Phantom Gaming Series from ASRock with their Z390 Phantom Gaming X and we are hoping to see the same quality in the X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX... [PCSTATS]

If you're tight on cash but want a really good monitor, this is the article for you. For putting together this buying guide we narrowed down our options to displays that give you the best experience for the lowest possible price.... [PCSTATS]

There are thousands upon thousands of PC games out there, and hundreds of good ones. However, some have stood out over the years, and cemented themselves as absolute must-haves in their respective genres. These are 15 titles we feel every PC gamer should have in their digital library.... [PCSTATS]

Brent Simmons, the developer of the NetNewsWire RSS reader, is questioning his decision to put an unread count next to each feed, reasoning that it encourages people to be too obsessive about reading every item:

Instead of a dozen bookmarks, people had a hundred feeds. Or two hundred. Or two thousand.

And there was a tyranny behind keeping track of unread items and showing an unread count. People reacted in different ways, but many people felt like they always had to go through everything.

Including me. To this day.

I did not know this was going to happen. That was not the idea: it was a side effect of reasonable (at the time) choices.

I like seeing these counts on feeds where I need to read all items that are posted, but that's only a small percentage of the 100-120 feeds I follow. It would be nice to turn that off for others I read more casually.

Feedly presents unread counts on each feed and folder of feeds. There's a Mark As Read button to clear a count, but when you click it, the confirmation dialog acts like it's an extremely consequential decision: "Are you sure you want to mark this entire source as read? This operation cannot be undone."

I've posed a question on the RSS-Public mailing list: Do you think feed readers should count unread items?

If you need to load an RSS feed with the PHP programming language, the open source library SimplePie greatly simplifies the process of pulling in items from a feed to present on a website, store in a database or do something else coooool with the data. There's a full installation guide for SimplePie but you can skip it with just three steps:

1. Download SimplePie 1.5.
2. Copy the file autoloader.php and the folder library to a folder that's accessible from your PHP code.
3. Make note of this folder; you'll be using require_once() to load autoloader.php from that location.

SimplePie has been designed to work the same regardless a feed's format. It supports RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom and the earlier versions of RSS. Additionally it can read feed elements from nine namespaces.

Here's PHP code that loads feed items from the news site Techdirt and displays them in HTML:

// load the SimplePie library
require_once('/var/www/libraries/simplepie-1.5/autoloader.php');

// load the feed
$feed = new SimplePie();
$feed->set_feed_url('https://www.techdirt.com/feed/');
$feed->init();
$feed->handle_content_type();

// create the output
$html_output = '';
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {
  $html_output .= '<p><a href="' . $item->get_link() . '">' . $item->get_title() . '</a></p>';
  $html_output .= $item->get_description();
  $html_output .= '<p>By ' . $item->get_author(0)->get_name() . ', ' . $item->get_date();
}

// display the output
ECHO <<<END
$html_output
END;


The API documentation for SimplePie_Item lists the functions that can extract data from each feed item. The versatility of the library is demonstrated by get_authors(), which can retrieve an item's authorship information whether it was in the RSS author element, Dublin Core creator, iTunes author, or Atom author.

SimplePie supports caching so that a feed isn't downloaded every time code is executed. The addition of these lines turns on caching, specifies the location of a cache folder and sets the time to use a cached version to four hours (14,400 seconds):

$feed->set_cache_location('/var/www/cache/');
$feed->set_cache_duration(14400);
$feed->enable_cache();

SimplePie was created by RSS Advisory Board member Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon and Ryan McCue. The project is currently maintained on GitHub by Malcom Blaney.

There are a lot of libraries for processing XML data with Java that can be used to read RSS feeds. One of the best is the open source library XOM created by the computer book author Elliotte Rusty Harold.

As he wrote one of his 20 books about Java and XML, Harold got so frustrated with the available Java libraries for XML that he created his own. XOM, which stands for XML Object Model, was designed to be easy to learn while still being strict about XML, requiring documents that are well-formed and utilize namespaces in complete adherence to the specification. (At the RSS Advisory Board, talk of following a spec is our love language.)

XOM was introduced in 2002 and is currently up to version 1.3.9, though all versions have remained compatible since 1.0. To use XOM, download the class library in one of the packages available on the XOM homepage. You can avoid needing any further configuration by choosing one of the options that includes third-party JAR files in the download. This allows XOM to use an included SAX parser under the hood to process XML.

Here's Java code that loads items from The Guardian's RSS 2.0 feed containing articles by Ben Hammersley, displaying them as HTML output:

// create an XML builder and load the feed using a URL
Builder bob = new Builder();
Document doc = bob.build("https://www.theguardian.com/profile/benhammersley/rss");
// load the root element and channel
Element rss = doc.getRootElement();
Element channel = rss.getFirstChildElement("channel");
// load all items in the channel
Elements items = channel.getChildElements("item");
for (Element item : items) {
  // load elements of the item
  String title = item.getFirstChildElement("title").getValue();
  String author = item.getFirstChildElement("creator",
    "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/").getValue();
  String description = item.getFirstChildElement("description").getValue();
  // display the output
  System.out.println(">h2>" + title + ">/h2>");
  System.out.println(">p>>b>By " + author + ">/b>>/p>");
  System.out.println(">p>" + description + ">/p>");

All of the classes used in this code are in the top-level package nu.xom, which has comprehensive JavaDoc describing their use. Like all Java code this is a little long-winded, but Harold's class names do a good job of explaining what they do. A Builder uses its build() method with a URL as the argument to load a feed into a Document over the web. There are also other build methods to load a feed from a file, reader, input stream, or string.

Elements can be retrieved by their names such as "title", "link" or "description". An element with only one child of a specific type can be retrieved using the getFirstChildElement() method with the name as the argument:

Element linkElement = item.getFirstChildElement("link");

An element containing multiple children of the same type uses getChildElements() instead:

Elements enclosures = item.getChildElements("enclosure");
if (enclosures.size() > 1) {
  System.out.println("I'm pretty sure an item should only include one enclosure");
}

If an element is in a namespace, there must be a second argument providing the namespace URI. Like many RSS feeds, the ones from The Guardian use a dc:creator element from Dublin Core to credit the item's author. That namespace has the URI "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/".

If the element specified in getFirstChildElement() or getChild Elements() is not present, those methods return null. You may need to check for this when adapting the code to load other RSS feeds.

If the name Ben Hammersley sounds familiar, he coined the term "podcasting" in his February 2004 article for The Guardian about the new phenomenon of delivering audio files in RSS feeds.

After a 2021 leak at the U.S. military’s Red Hill fuel storage facility poisoned thousands, activists, Native Hawaiians, and affected military families have become unlikely allies in the fight for accountability.

Journalist Peter Yeung explains how Los Cedros has remained protected for years thanks to Ecuador’s constitution extending rights to nature.

The RNC’s idea of “Making America Safe Again” is centered on policing and harsh anti-immigrant detention, not on gun violence.

Indigenous communities have long resisted the false narratives of imperialist nations and are experts at countering the political violence of white supremacy.

High-profile, disruptive protests can lead to increased polarization—but often still yield increased public support for the protest’s goals, even if the tactics are criticized.

Violence against communities of color has always been political, but American elites have avoided that framing, says NDN Collective’s Janene Yazzie.

A new ballot measure in California would reverse progress on reducing mass incarceration. Here's what our regular correspondent Dortell Williams has to say about it.

Kamala Harris can and should be critiqued for her political résumé—but criticism rooted in misogynoir should have no place in political discourse.

Young adult author Jordan Ifueko has created new worlds with her best-selling series Raybearer, centering Black characters and workers.

Project 2025, created by the extremist right-wing Heritage Foundation, fortifies the racist impact of policing by empowering the Department of Justice to focus on violent crime, despite the fact that

In the wake of AIPAC’s ouster of two pro-Palestine congressional Democrats, a Jewish American digs into the reality of Zionist influence in American politics.

To show their support of a future Madame President, Gov. Tim Walz and others in the party are publicly relinquishing male power and privilege.

Right-wing forces are recruiting Asian Americans. Here’s how community members are countering this growing extremism.

Donald Trump’s debunked claims tap into a centuries-long racist narrative that has real impact on Haitian immigrants and Haitian Americans, in Ohio and beyond.

The Tony Award-winning play, loosely based on Alicia Keys’ childhood, falls into the same trap much theatre does, failing to depict the nuances of Black trauma.

Faced with the spread of militarized police training facilities known as "cop cities," grassroots activists are taking the call to #DefundPolice to cities nationwide.

A new statewide proposal is the latest development in a years-long saga over the voting rights of felons in the Sunshine State.

Some localities are granting limited voting rights to noncitizens, especially on issues directly affecting them.

A coalition of churches has achieved some successes in resisting and mitigating against rent gouging and displacement after Hurricane Ian.

Analyst Lindsay Koshgarian counters President Biden’s claim that American interests require funding Israeli militarism.

In bringing electric vehicle battery plants under its national contract, the UAW took a major step toward transitioning away from fossil fuels in a way that protects workers' rights.

Rio de Janeiro’s Port Zone was once the largest slave port in the Americas. As developers work to “revitalize” the area, Black activists are fighting to retain the remnants of the district’s historical significance.

Rethinking our connection to the soil can form the basis for new ways of thinking about prosperity and economy

A paradigm shift for our economy begins when we name and see the anti-democratic bias that lies at the heart of our capital-centric system.

A new database of tribal constitutions tells a more nuanced history of self-governance than the one explained in textbooks.

Across the country, activists are battling gentrification and working to build sustainable cities that don’t displace working-class communities of color.

Street selling is a risky activity in Mexico City. But the mercaditas movement aims to empower women and nonbinary sellers to protect themselves from economic exploitation.

Amid ongoing colonization, the Indigenous Shuar people are taking back control of their economic and political futures.

”Atoms Never Touch“ offers a revolutionary premise: The love between trans women is the key to the new world we imagine.

In rural Argentina, Hacienda Camino offers parents a suite of skills and resources to help raise healthy children.

Sex education is often taboo in close-knit Druze communities, but a new generation is creating its own care networks.

Even before abortion became illegal in 14 states, some reproductive health care clinics were rebranding to better reflect the broad spectrum of gender-inclusive care they provide.

Women of color want demographic and political representation, just as wealthy white men have had for generations.

Facing a health care system without sufficient translation services and a grueling economic landscape, Punjabi residents in Fresno, California, have created an organization to help meet their community’s unique needs.

Author Hilary Giovale knows that moving through guilt into accountability creates necessary change—for yourself and others.

Kamala Harris may win the presidency, but the media’s portrayal of her won’t challenge the expectations of those who see Black women as their mammies.