Automated News Feeds: The RSS Standard For News Feeds

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Automated News FeedsThe RSS Standard For News
Feeds
Pres 2

• Brian Kelly
• UKOLN
• University of Bath
• Bath, BA2 7AY

Email B.Kelly_at_ukoln.ac.uk URL http//www.ukoln.ac.
uk/
UKOLN is supported by
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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 lt!-- Start Of
Moreover.com News Javascript Code --gt ltSCRIPT
LANGUAGE"Javascript"gt lt!-- // 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
H

• 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

ltitem rdfabout"http//www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-DOM-
Level-3-Events-20010410/"gt lttitlegtDOM Level 3
Events Working Draft Publishedlt/titlegt
ltdescriptiongt10 April 2001 The DOM Working
Group has published an updated Working Draft of
.lt/descriptiongt ltlinkgthttp//www.w3.org/TR/2001/
WD-DOM-Level-3-Events-20010410/lt/linkgt lt/itemgt
Now try exercises B5-3, B5-4 and B5-5 to gain
experiences in using and creating RSS
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Parsing RSS

• W3Cs news information is available as an RSS file

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Creating RSS

• RSSxpress 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 lthttp//www.blogspace.com/rss/gt
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Approaches To Viewing

• UKOLN 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 lthttp//rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/gt and
lthttp//rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/lite/gt
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Other Parsers (1)

• RSS files can be processed by many applications -
• for example My.Netscape.com

See lthttp//my.netscape.com/publish/help/mnn20/qu
ickstart.htmlgt 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)
http//www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/rss/

• 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.

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Other Parsers (3)
See lthttp//www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer/gt

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

Moreover provide a free tickertape
application See lthttp//w.moreover.com/dev/ticker
.htmlgt
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Other Parsers (4)
lthttp//www.feedreader.com/gt

• A final example of a news reader is Feedreader.