RSS is everywhere! Today, you can find thousands of RSS feeds. WebLog users, news publishers, government agents, and many individuals and commercial Web sites support this format. Java technology, Perl, PHP, Python and other major programming languages provide developers with tools for processing RSS. Many readers and aggregates are working in web, desktop or even e-mail clients. RSS has become a chain content and metadata facts on the Internet.
What is RSS? RSS is a format of chain content and metadata on the Internet. Usually used to share the title and the link to the news article. For news articles, the real article is not necessarily shared, but metadata about the article is usually shared; this metadata can contain headings, URLs or summary. For publishers, RSS is an important tool because of the provision of the chain and integrate the third party's content into your site.
RSS is an XML dialect. All RSS files must meet the XML 1.0 specification published on the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C) Web site.
Here is a typical example, explaining how to use RSS:
A publisher has some desirable content. They created an RSS channel for these contents. Some items on this channel containing web pages wishing promotion. This channel can be read and converted into title and links by a remote application. These links can be added to a new web page or for specialized readers. People see this link from different sites, click on the connection to the initial publisher's website.
Although the title chain is the most common RSS usage, it can also be used for other purposes. RSS is a very popular format in the WebLog community. It is also used for photo books, classified ads, recipes, comments, and tracking software packages.
RSS is used as a way to deliver information in e-commerce. For example, Amazon provides news to customers based on its Web service platform. This allows you to learn about the best-selling books in your news reader, or include information about the related books sold by Amazon in your Web site.
In the past few years, RSS has an amazing growth in popularity. Syndic8.com maintains an RSS channel index, and its balance is less than 1400% in two years. Yahoo News, BBC, SlashDot, Lockergnome, Amazon, CNN, Wired, Rolling Stone, and Apple Computer are located in many of the most popular RSS feeds.
News readers have a new software type with the increase of news, and there is a new software type: news reader. News Readers are personal aggregat - help you discover and organize a list of channels. Once you have selected the channel, you can use the interface that is consistent with the connector. News Readers Check the update of the channel you are interested in and transform into HTML that can be viewed.
A popular news reader is blogExpress:
Figure 1. View alphaworks in BlogExpress
BlogExpress is the so-called "Pizza Software" - means that if you like this software, you can send some money to buy a pizza.
Custom channels add a channel in BlogExpress. For example, you are interested in tracking activities at the IBM AlphaWorks site. The first thing you have to do is take a summary of the increase:
Figure 2. News findings found in AlphaWorks
Add a summary, orange "XML" logo is often used to link public RSS feeds. In most web browsers, you can right-click the "XML" flag to copy link and paste into your news reader.
Other common news readers include Blogstreet, FeedReader, Amphetadesk, and Newsgator (see Resources). Discover RSS, you can use the search engine to find the contents of the RSS format. For example, when using Google, you can add "FileType: RSS" to search for the lookup item in the .rss file.
Special search engines make content search easier. Feedster monitors WebLog and allows you to look up through a log item index, view it according to Correlation, Date, Logrank. When you are searching, Feedster creates an RSS feed asking for your request. This feed can be added to your news reader so you can see all the latest activities related to search requests, and you don't even need to leave the news reader.
Daypop Search News, BLOG and RSS. It allows you to track popular news in WebLog world. It provides the current most popular 40 WebLog links. This is the link between the world's most popular articles. It creates a list of the most popular vocabulary used in WebLog. It also provides a weblog list that is the most popular WEBLOGGER. You can also customize your search. Rating lists and custom searchs have RSS's own form, you can import your news reader.
The new feature of RSS 2.0 RSS 2.0 is based on the RSS 0.91 specification. It is backward compatible, so any tool for processing RSS 2.0 should also handle 0.91 summary. The upgraded specification adds a small amount of elements, such as
It also removed some restrictions. In the past, and
However, a greater change is to expand this format using the namespace. RSS 2.0 supports namespaces, a standard method for increasing elements that are not in specifications. As long as defined in a namespace, the brow can contain new elements.
RSS 2.0 Overview RSS is an XML dialect for chain web content and metadata. RSS 0.91 is the most commonly used version of available versions. For new RSS feeds, a better way is to use version 2.0 because it is a current specification, and as mentioned earlier, it is compatible with 0.91.
Dave Winer wrote a version 2.0 version. The modification of the specification may become difficult to use, or damage the existing application, and he consciously avoids this situation. Winer summarized his thoughts: "It is simple. This is the value of RSS. Anyone who is slightly HTML can understand the RSS. This is extremely important!"
This specification is issued under the Creative Commons license (see Resources). This means you can copy and distribute this specification for free and derived, and freely for business work. An advisory committee is responsible for updating norms, promoting specifications and writing documents.
The RSS file form RSS file consists of a
The channel channel generally has three elements, providing information about the channel itself:
Also, many other optional channel elements can also be used. Most are themselves:
Items are usually the most important part of the short. Each item can be recorded about a WebLog, a full document, a movie review, a classified ad or any desired content that is hoped with the channel chain. Other elements in the channel may remain unchanged, but items often change.
You can have any multiple items. The previous specification limit is 15 items. If you want to keep backward compatibility, this is still a good upper limit.
Elements of news items typically contain three elements:
There are other optional elements:
Listing 1 is an example of an RSS 2.0 file. Note that the channel is included in
Listing 1. Example RSS 2.0 file
XML Version = "1.0"?>
http://www.urlofthechannel.com/ link>
description>
http://www.urlofthechannel.com/ link>
iMAGE>
http://www.itworld.com/nl/ecom_in_act/11122003/ link>
Digital Media Is A Problem for Many Businesss. It May Also Be
a hidden opportunity. Just As Open Source Licensing Has Opened
Up New Possibilities in the World of Technology, IT Promises to do
The Same in the area of create content. description> item>
http://www.itworld.com/nl/ecom_in_Act/08202003/ link>
The Internet. Many Use Person-to-Person File Sharing Programs Like
Kazaa to Share and Download Music in MP3 Format, Paying Nothing.
THIS HAS Made It Difficult for Companies To Setup Online Music
BusinessS. How Can companies Compete Against Free? description>
item>
CHANNEL>
rss>
Related Tools Due to the popularity of RSS, many tools have enable you to use these files substantially in any environment:
Java technology: A RSS Utilities Package found on the Sun Site, supports using Tag Library in JavaServer Pages. It also includes an RSS parser. Perl: There are several Perl tools that process RSS. XML :: RSS provides a framework for creating and maintaining the RSS file. It supports conversion between common versions. Python: rss.py is a set of classes that use the RSS channel through Python.
In addition, many content management and WebLog tools also support RSS directly. Most WebLog tools, including Movable Type, Blogger, and Radio Userland support RSS. Some content management systems, including Zope and CityDesk, now support it.
Extending RSSRSS 2.0 has many optional elements, including those required by most channels. But it also supports scalability, so you can use the elements in the specification. However, the RSS 2.0 specification does not spend how much time definitions implement extension. Regarding the scalability, the specification is summarized as: "RSS will include the elements not described in this page as long as these elements are defined in a namespace."
This has left a big imagination space! Fortunately, the specification contains an example where you can refer to several examples currently.
Basic ideas are that you can increase the required labels - but increases the elements with multiple meanings. People who use your channel may not know what a tag is meaningful. For example, if I want to use the
Therefore, RSS allows you to add anything you like, but require it to be used with namespaces. This helps clarify the meaning of the label.
Go back to
This creates a namespace called "ebusiness" and indicates the documentation of this name space on my site. In order to use the
Regarding the scalability, a more practical example can be found in the sample file of the RSS 2.0 specification:
Listing 2. RSS 2.0 specification sample space in the sample file
XML Version = "1.0"?>
http://www.scripting.com/ link>
Http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/Userland/scriptingnewsLeftlinks.opml
blogchannel: blogroll>
Who loves names? description>
Http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2002/09/29#when:12:59:01pm
guid>
item>
CHANNEL>
rss>
In this example, a namespace called BlogChannel is defined. It points to a document that explains several commonly used new elements for WebLog. One of them is
Conclusion This paper examines the importance of RSS in content chain and aggregation. The article mainly discusses RSS 2.0 because this is the latest version of the specification, and is rapidly popular. This article also examines the tools that process RSS, including agglomerates, verification programs, and parsers. For more information, please refer to the reference.