Rich Site Summary [L1 ] or RDF Site Summary [L2 ]. There are some heated debates [L3 ] about what RSS is but at its core it's an XML syntax for providing summaries of news based websites. An RSS document consists of one or more channels with one or more items. Each item is usually a news story with a title, a link and possibly a description. Newer versions of RSS [L4 ] provide for more properties for each item.
Steve's Wiki [L5 ] has RSS capabilities. That is you can get the Recent Changes page as an RSS file.
For that matter, now this wiki does as well.
LV So, what does one do with RSS? For what purpose does one make data available in this format? For what can one use it that they couldn't just use the html pages?
MR Larry, it lets people easily track updates or changes from a large number of websites very quickly, using an application called a news aggregator. Rather than having to visit 50 websites for news, all the latest headlines are downloaded automatically and shown in a way that makes it very quick to see only what is new, and read just what I want. Since very recently adding it to CourseForum and ProjectForum its been a godsend, letting me monitor dozens of Wiki sites with practically zero effort.
LV Ah, Mark, so it is a format that some applications can interpret and use to display a series of links. Allows one, it appears, to do some sort of dynamic personalization of headlines or whatever the site wants to advertise.
MR Sort of. See e.g. the main window screenshot linked to from http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/
Petteri K offers
lynx -source http://www.iki.fi/petterik/rss.cgi > rss.cgi
tclsh rss.cgi 0b00 as a demonstration of RSS capabilities.
LV I am uncertain what this script is for. When I run it, all I see is a series of lines from ActiveState. I do not seem to see anything from the other URLs listed in the script. I added two URLs - one for Tcler's Wiki and one for Steve's Wiki (listed above) - surely their sites should have shown up in the rss.cgi's output.
A nice discussion from another Wiki [L6 ].
LV What Tcl-related sites provide RSS information? Is the Tcl-URL provided in RSS? Other information? Could the Tcl-URL editors make use of RSS someway?
Scott Gamon - I, for one, would love to see a RSS feed for Tcl-URL. Or a RSS feed for news:comp.lang.tcl .
NEM - Well, your wish is my command. I have a cgi script at http://mod3.net/~nem/cgi-bin/usenetrss.cgi which grabs the latest comp.lang.tcl headlines as an RSS feed. It scrapes groups.google.com for this information. You can also grab an RSS feed for any other group, by appending ?group=<my group> to the URL (e.g. for clta, you would use http://mod3.net/~nem/cgi-bin/usenetrss.cgi?group=comp.lang.tcl.announce ). You might be able to grab an RSS feed of Tcl-URL! in a similar way (or ask DDJ to provide one), but with wiki and clt feeds, you get all the information in Tcl-URL!, just missing the commentary. Oh - one thing. If you use this feed, please note that it only updates once every hour, so please don't try to access it more than that. It sets appropriate Expires and Cache-Control headers if you are going through a cacheing proxy.
See also tclog, and giggle (both weblog applications).