ProvGardener aggregates news from more than 60 websites. The most useful parts of News are the categorized items. News concerning cities and towns can be found on the Municipality pages. News that fits Categories can be found on the Category pages. Some news items are selected for the Featured News (if it would interest anyone), or for News for Rhode Islanders (if it is of particular interest to state residents). Everything from ecoRI is here, indexed, and often featured or marked for Rhode Islanders' attention.
Some observations:
- News is automatically gathered from websites that have enabled RSS feeds. Many websites have not enabled this wonderful free feature. If you are responsible for distributing news about your environmental organization, look into using RSS.
- ProvGardener would prefer to have trimmed news items rather than entire news items. ProvGardener encourages reading news items at the source.
- Some sources (e.g., Providence Journal) set up their RSS feeds that make it hard to automatically grab exactly what ProvGardener wants, resulting in a lot of irrelevant (to the purpose of this website) or duplicate items. I have to spend some time deleting a lot of old irrelevant stuff.
- Sometimes the automatic "bot" that pulls in the content stops working for some of the sites.
- Adding news by hand would be completely impossible! Too time consuming!
In other words, the news in this website is just a taste of what could be. Much to improve here. But it's already a quick way to see a range of environmental news from ecoRI and several other sources.