*! version 1.1.0 01jan2010
help nytimes

Title

nytimes -- Top news stories from the New York Times

Syntax

nytimes
[,
feed(feedname)
number(#)]

Description

nytimes displays items from New York Times RSS feeds. It requires a connection to the internet.

Options

feed(feedname) allows the user to specify which New York Times feed will be displayed. The default is the NYTimes.com Home Page (U.S.).
As of January 2011, other feed possiblities included: global home;
news sites focusing on the world, Africa, the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East;
US news feeds focusing on the US, education, politics, NY region, and energy environment;
business news feeds focusing on global business, small business, economy, media and advertising, and your money;
technology news feeds focusing on business-computing, internet, personal tech, and start-ups;
sports news feeds focusing on sports, global sports, baseball, college basketball, college football, golf, hockey, pro basketball, pro football, soccer, and tennis;
science news feeds focusing on science, environment, space, health research, nutrition, health care policy; and many more.
A complete list is available.

number(#) allows the user to specify how many feeds will displayed. The default is 5.

Remarks

This command is a very crude RSS reader for feeds produced by the New York Times. It reports the headline, which is a hyperlink
to the full text of the newspaper article, a brief article summary, and the date and time the article was published. Clicking on a headline will open up the article in your default web browser.

If you want a number of feed items different than five, you may include the number as option. For example nytimes, n(10) will return the ten more recent items.
Normally, the Times feed only reports about a dozen items which creates an upper limit for the number of story summaries that will be displayed.

nytimes doesn't work well for NYTimes.com blogs, as it is not set up to parse the ones that are routed through Feedburner. Some blog feeds will work, some will not.

nytimes has no knowledge of whether or not you have seen a particular item before, so it will repeat items if you make multiple calls to it over a short period of time.

Examples

. nytimes

. nytimes, feed(arts)

. nytimes, n(1)

. nytimes, f(sports) n(3)

Author

Neal Caren (neal.caren@unc.edu) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill