Automated News Feeds: The RSS Standard For News Feeds Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY UKOLN is supported by: Email [email protected]

Automated News Feeds:The RSS Standard

For News Feeds

Brian Kelly

UKOLN

University of Bath

Bath, BA2 7AY

UKOLN is supported by:

[email protected]://www.ukoln.ac.uk/

Pres 2

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The Guardian Feed

An example of a Guardian news feed is illustrated.

Note that you have to use your own Perl script to process the news information.

All the Guardian provides is the URL of the news feed.

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Moreover

Moreover provides a wizard for choosing your news feed and its appearance

To use the news feed, simply include the JavaScript code in your Web page

 <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="Javascript">  <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="Javascript"> <!-- // load global_article array with articles from category if (article != null) …

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Need For Standards

Proprietary approach: Every supplier has its own format for

news feeds Many different applications needed to

download and parse news feeds

Standards approach: Open standard format for news Single application can be used with

news feeds from different suppliers

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RSS

RSS:• Originally (v 0.9) stood for Rich Site Summary• A popular lightweight XML standard for

distributing news feeds and syndication• Now an RDF application – RDF Site Summary

<item rdf:about="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-DOM-Level-3-Events-20010410/"> <title>DOM Level 3 Events Working Draft Published</title> <description>10 April 2001: The DOM Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of ….</description> <link>http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-DOM-Level-3-Events-20010410/</link> </item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-DOM-Level-3-Events-20010410/"> <title>DOM Level 3 Events Working Draft Published</title> <description>10 April 2001: The DOM Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of ….</description> <link>http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-DOM-Level-3-Events-20010410/</link> </item>

Now try exercises B5-3, B5-4 and B5-5 to gain experiences in using and creating RSSNow try exercises B5-3, B5-4 and B5-5 to gain experiences in using and creating RSS

H

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Parsing RSSW3C’s news information is available as an RSS file

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Creating RSSRSSxpress is an example of a Web-based tool which can be used to createan RSS file

This tool was developed by UKOLN

Other tools are available to create RSS, and expect to see them in a CMS (Zope already does this).See <http://www.blogspace.com/rss/>

Other tools are available to create RSS, and expect to see them in a CMS (Zope already does this).See <http://www.blogspace.com/rss/>

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Approaches To ViewingUKOLN has two RSS parsers:

RSSxpress:• A CGI program• Requires SysAdmin to install

locally and configure• Works with any browser

RSSxpress-lite:• JavaScript solution which can

be used by HTML authors• Browser must support

JavaScript• Need style sheet to improve

appearance of news feeds

See <http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/> and <http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/lite/>

See <http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/> and <http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/lite/>

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Other Parsers (1)

RSS files can be processed by many applications -

for example My.Netscape.com

See <http://my.netscape.com/publish/help/mnn20/quickstart.html> for details on creating, validating and publishing your RSS file so that it is accessible in My.Netscape

See <http://my.netscape.com/publish/help/mnn20/quickstart.html> for details on creating, validating and publishing your RSS file so that it is accessible in My.Netscape

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Other Parsers (2)

The Redland RSS 1.0 Viewer is an open source Web service allowing you to take RSS 1.0 feeds and format them as HTML

It was developed by Dave Beckett, ILRT, University of Bristol.

http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/rss/http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/rss/

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Moreover provide a free tickertape applicationSee <http://w.moreover.com/dev/ticker.html>

Other Parsers (3)

Headline Viewer is an MS Windows application that lets you see news headlines from a configurable list of Headline providers

See <http://www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer/>See <http://www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer/>

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Other Parsers (4)

A final example of a news reader is Feedreader.

<http://www.feedreader.com/><http://www.feedreader.com/>

Documents

Automated News Feeds: The RSS Standard For News Feeds Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY UKOLN is supported by: Email [email protected]