Understanding and Using RSS
Kevin Eye
University at Buffalo
Creative Services
What is RSS?
- A way to share content
- This content exchange is also called “syndication”
- Rich Site Summary
- Really Simple Syndication
What problem does RSS solve?
- Content authors
- Standardized way to share, distribute, publish content
- Content consumers (site authors, end users)
- Standardized way to receive and aggregate content
- Standardized way to receive and aggregate content
- Standardization allows the content to be automatically processed
How does it work?
- Just a specially-formatted (XML) page on a server
- Typically a list of news headlines with links
- Can be extended to a full database
- Typically updated frequently, with new stories added to the top and older stories dropping off the bottom
- Often called a “feed” because it can be a constantly updating stream of content
Let’s look at some feeds
Let’s look at some feeds
Let’s look at some feeds
Let’s look at some feeds
- Blogs
- “Web 2.0’ Applications
Let’s look at some feeds
- UB Sites
What do I do with it?
- RSS News Readers (a.k.a. Aggregators)
- Firefox Live Bookmarks
- Portals
- Normal sites
How does it really work?
RSS in your site
- Client-side (requires special browser support)
- Script Include
- Pure JavaScript
- Server-side (requires special server support)
Make your own
- How?
- notepad.exe (or any text editor)
- Blogging software
- Desktop software
- Most content management tools
- Customize your content manager
- Convert your HTML on the fly
- Test it
- Promote it
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My RSS" href="stories.rss">