Version 7 of RSS

Updated 2003-06-20 10:15:36

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.


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 When I run this script, all I see is a series of lines from ActiveState. None of the other URLs listed in the cgi are shown. 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 ].


Category Acronym | Category Internet