From: Aron Roberts (aron@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 10 2003 - 14:11:22 PST
Some campus departments are beginning to offer RSS 'feeds' of news
headlines and other content, which can be incorporated into other web
sites, portals, and even be viewed by desktop and Web-based viewers.
An item of potential interest for anyone whose site generates RSS:
Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby recently began offering a free Web-based
validator for RSS -- claimed to cover all of the various RSS formats
from 0.91 through 2.0, although 'optimized' for 2.0 -- at:
http://feeds.archive.org/validator/
This validator is Python-based and you can also run it on your own
computer, as noted at <http://feeds.archive.org/validator/about.html>.
What is RSS?
------------
As John Corante has succinctly described it, RSS is "an easy way for
sites to share their content with others (aka 'syndicate' their
content)." A readable RSS primer is Andy King's "Introduction to
RSS" <http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/>.
An example of a site offering RSS feeds of its news headlines is
IST's iNews Channels, created by Kalle Nemvalts:
http://inews.berkeley.edu:7077/about.html#aboutChannels
And an example of a site that aggregates and allows custom
selection of RSS content from many sources is MyHaas, the Web portal
for the Haas School of Business, created by Zane Cooper and the Haas
Computing Services Team:
A good non-technical introduction to setting up a desktop 'news
aggregator' - a tool which allows you to read content from many
different RSS feeds - is
<http://www.llrx.com/features/rssforlibrarians.htm>. This article
also briefly discusses the use of NewzCrawler
<http://www.newzcrawler.com/>, a Windows-based RSS viewer. Another
popular Windows news aggregator is AmphetaDesk
<http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/>. And NetNewsWire Lite
<http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/> is an example of a viewer for Mac
OS X. And there are many other, similar tools available.
Finally, for additional discussion of RSS and other XML-based data
formats used for syndicating content, see
<http://seaotter.berkeley.edu/xml/syndication-formats.html>.
Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group
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