Ken Varnum – RSS Basics and Beyond : Tips and Tricks for Getting the Most out of Syndicated Content. (PowerPoint) (Handout)
Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
- Data format: RSS, RDF, Atom, etc.
- data interchange (sharing) : syndication – think of what AP or Reuters does with news stories
Where does RSS come from?
- blog software
- CMS/wikis (“what’s new feeds”)
- Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc – search databases (Search Alerts)
Reminder to remember copyright
Tools – common traits
- can access feed
- can track whats been seen already
- can reproduce item content
- can link to original source
Computer-based:
- FeedDemon
- FeedReader
- NetNewsWire (Mac)
Browser-based:
- Safari
- IE7
- Firefox / thunderbird
Aggregators (web-based):
- Yahoo
- Bloglines
- Google Reader (now offline-enabled)
Integration — RSS = Stream of information = easy to integrate into HTML
hooks:
- webblog software
- cms
- wikis
HTML:
Myfeedz — from Adobe’s Romanian office
generates new content based on your feed choices
Create “live” subject guides
del.icio.us (all tags have RSS feeds)
New books lists
Checked out book reminders for patrons
Monitoring the web
web page changes
Google Alerts
Page2RSS
Roll your own
Write by hand (not recommended)
set up free blog
write a script (Perl, PHP, Ruby)
FeedXs
Course reserve lists on class pages as an example of a script
Notes: Kens presentation was great as an overview of what can be done with RSS beyond just blog postings and news story gathering. I plan to use several of his suggestions, and expect that it will change the way I work with the web.
