Construct the atom feed using
  atomgen -o atom.xml <command> <command options>
See
  atomgen --help
for more information.

For example:
  atomgen -o atom.xml new --title 'Physics 201' --author 'W. Trevor King' \
    http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~wking/phys201
  echo "Changes to the Phys201 website will be noted in this feed." | \
    atomgen -o atom.xml add -i atom.xml 'Feed purpose' \
    http://www.physics.drexel.edu/~wking/phys201

I've written little scripts to simplify my more common calls to
atomgen, and these scripts live in the creatively-named `script'
subdirectory.

You can send automatic emails to your students when you publish new
announcements in the atom feed.  The best way I have found to date
consists of monitoring the posted atom.xml file with rss2email
  http://rss2email.infogami.com/
I setup r2e to monitor the feed and email me when there's a change.
r2e runs every 15 minutes in a cron job
  15 * * * * /usr/bin/r2e run
Then I set up a procmail rule to forward the mail off to the list
  :0
  * ^From: "Physics 201, W. Trevor King" <rss2email@null.invalid>$
  ! `grep -v '^#' $HOME/course/announcements/addresses.txt`
  # ^--- Make sure those are backticks, BTW (ASCII 96) ---^