Documents and tools for RSS
Thought I'd put together a page of very helpful RSS related links for my and other's future reference.
Technical
RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters. a very nice document. one you could use to explain RSS to your boss.
Webmonkey on RSS: May 14, 2003
RSS Resources has a rich collection of links to RSS history, tutorials, Perl examples, and lots more.
RSS Generator very handy and simple tool that let's you enter a headline and link to and create an instant RSS feed document. Try it.
MyRSS will generate an RSS channel for you of any webpage
Content Syndication with RSS by Ben Hammersley. This terrific O'Reilly book, published in March 2003, is filled with great examples in Perl and Java, etc that really get your mind going with the possibilities. This is a link to the O'Reilly page on the book. And here's a link to my weblog posting on the book. That weblog post was mentioned in the All Consuming page on the RSS book. Cool.
Userland documentation on RSS 2.0
RSS Search Engine - excellent
New York Times RSS 2.0 feeds
Interesting Articles on RSS
"Most of the RSS community is focused on content. That's great; so was the early Web. But feeding classified ads to aggregators is the next obvious step, and will prove to be hugely profitable for newspapers — or whoever decides to do it first. "
"And he sees revenue possibilities here. "RSS could be a great way of distributing and reading classified ad information, customized to the user's preferences. If news media don't do this soon, eBay and Monster will."
Programming Lessons learned by me
Rather than use RSS specific packages or modules to parse an RSS feed, I found it helpful to get proficient at a package that uses XPath expressions. With an XPath expression like "/ / item ", you have the additional advantage of not having to worry about the different RSS versions. You just find the item element, then from there the child elements of description, etc are just one level below. I often have need to parse all sorts of XML, not just RSS, so the XPath skill comes in handy.
Something like this in Perl works just great:
$rss_feed = <your RSS feed> # from url or file
$xp = XML::XPath->new(xml => $rss_feed);
foreach my $news_item ($xp->findnodes('//item')) {
print $news_item->findvalue('description')."\n";
}
<description> is always a child of <item>, in any RSS version, so the code above should work for any version.
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© Copyright
2004
Al Nevarez.
Last update:
1/25/2004; 1:39:33 AM. |
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