BaRf: Bioinformatics aggregated RSS feeds

Welcome to BaRf!

What's a "BaRf" anyways?

BaRf stands for "Bioinformatics aggregated RSS feeds". It provides RSS feeds of titles and abstracts of the most recent papers published by journals that may be of relevance for people involved in Bioinformatics. We don't claim this list is complete - if you have suggestions for journals that should be added (and appear in PubMed) please let us know. The list of currently available journals along with the RSS feed XML links can be found on the right of the page.

If you're still not sure what this site is all about, please have a look at the the FAQ category available from the navigation bar.


this feed i subscribed to seems to be broken. there's nothing in it. how can that be?

this feed i subscribed to seems to be broken. there's nothing in it. how can that be? BaRf only monitors publications of the last 30 days. some of the journals are published every two monhts, though. so it's quite clear, why some of the feeds may appear broken: there simply hasn't been any new publication within the last 30 days.

[ 17 Apr 04 | link ]

I'm not convinced/found a bug/have a suggestion and want to send you a virus/email - how can I contact you?

I'm not convinced/found a bug/have a suggestion and want to send you a virus/email - how can I contact you? No problem, you can send us an email any time (we won't reply to viruses though) - you can write to either Maxi Karasz (nachtalp@jcowboy.org) or Simon Tietze (bragil@spacecamping.com).

[ 03 Mar 04 | link ]

Wow, this stuff actually seems to work... but now, don't tell me you did all of this by yourself... you must've had some kind of help...

Wow, this stuff actually seems to work... but now, don't tell me you did all of this by yourself... you must've had some kind of help... Yep, that's right. Our code is actually just a handful of Ruby lines. Interfaces to PubMed are provided by BioRuby and our RSS feeds are generated using a slightly modified version of Ruby-RSS by Chad Fowler. For our config files we used the Syck YAML package.

[ 03 Mar 04 | link ]

OK, let's pretend I'm interested... Is this RSS thing so complicated that trying to set it up is actually going to make me barf?

OK, let's pretend I'm interested... Is this RSS thing so complicated that trying to set it up is actually going to make me barf? No, actually it is quite easy. All you need to do is download a RSS aggregator (e.g. Raggle (command line/web interface) or Sharp Reader (Windows, .NET-based), a more comprehensive list of RSS readers/aggregators can be found here) and choose the feeds you're interested in from the table on the right. The feeds are updated daily, so please make sure you don't refresh them too often (this saves us unnecessary traffic). From this point, the new publications should be updated in your aggregator and you should be able to read the abstracts of the new articles. More information about RSS is available here.

[ 03 Mar 04 | link ]

Why would anyone bother to waste his/her time with such a project?

Why would anyone bother to waste his/her time with such a project? First of all: because we can ;) - but more importantly, we found the traditional way of staying up to date with recent publications rather painful. Because we couldn't find RSS feeds for journals, we decided to write our own little interface to provide those feeds - hence BaRf was born.

[ 03 Mar 04 | link ]