Hour24.Syndicating the Web with RSS News Feeds

Hour 24. Syndicating the Web with RSS News Feeds

It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.

Jerry Seinfeld

What is equally as amazing as Jerry Seinfeld's newspaper observation is how much news is now read online instead of from the printed page. As a professional nerd, I'm probably not the best example of your "average person" from a tech perspective, but I only read printed newspapers when I have absolutely no access to the Web. I'm actually fairly old school in terms of generally enjoying printed material from newspapers to books to magazines, but for news you can't beat the immediacy of online publishing. Which brings me to the topic of this final lesson in the book: RSS news feeds.

If you've never heard of the term RSS, don't worry because it's not as complicated as many of the acronyms you've already faced throughout this book. In fact, once you get past the messy history of RSS, you'll find that it is a fairly simple technology both to understand and to use. I won't bother telling you what the RSS acronym stands for just yet because it has a different meaning depending on which version of RSS you use. However, I will tell you that RSS has made a significant impact on the Web and how people use it. Increasing numbers of Web users are relying solely on syndicated RSS "news feeds" to find out when there is something of interest worth seeing on a web site, as opposed to actually visiting that site. A story in an RSS feed links directly to the relevant content, allowing you to bypass the main page of the site containing the content.

RSS fits into this book because it is an XML-based technology, which simply means that the language used to code news feeds is an XML markup language. There are a variety of different ways that you can use RSS. You can display RSS feeds from other web sites on your web site, you can build your own library of RSS feeds and view them regularly using special software called a news aggregator, or you can syndicate your own site using RSS so that other people can view your feeds. This hour touches on all of these uses of RSS.

In this hour, you'll learn

• The historical drama of how RSS came to be

• How to use a news aggregator to syndicate RSS news feeds

• How to create and validate your own RSS documents

• How to transform and display RSS news feeds using XSLT