Content Syndication With RSS

Alex Moskalyuk writes "Ben Hammersley's Content Syndication with RSS is a step-by-step guide to implementing RSS. This standard is gaining popularity among the Web community, and some of your favorite sites might syndicate their content as RSS feeds. The new O'Reilly publication focuses on many aspects of this standard, and is of primary interest to developers, Web site designers, data architects and anyone interested in distributing their data around the Web." So if you have a steady stream of information for your customers, family, or fans, read on for the rest of Alex's review. Content Syndication With RSS author Ben Hammersley pages 222 publisher O'Reilly rating 8/10 reviewer Alex Moskalyuk ISBN 0596003838 summary Introduction and guide for RSS implementations

The first three chapters are primarily discussing the multiplicity of RSS standards. While with some other technologies it might seem a bit excessive, remember that RSS is a forked project with the forks at this moment bearing little resemblance to one another. The abbreviations even have different abbreviations - RSS means Really Simple Syndication if you are using RSS 0.91 or RSS 0.92, that was developed by Dave Winer. RSS means RDF Site Summary if the version you're using RSS 1.0. The development credits in this case go to RSS DEV team. To confuse you even more, the RSS 2.0 standard is deciphered as... correct, Really Simple Syndication again.

Hence chapter 4 discusses Winer's implementation (simplistic and user-friendly), while chapter 6 focuses on RSS 1.0 (RDF-compliant and data-architect-friendly), and chapter 8 talks about RSS 2.0 (improved RSS 0.9x). Chapter 4 is available online as a PDF file. Section 4.4 is recommended for those interested in promoting their RSS feeds as it provides pretty good reference to meta data.

Chapter 9 is perhaps of special interest to Web developers and administrators out there. It presents several code samples to properly parse RSS and present the result in readable HTML. The examples include (a) parsing with XML::Simple in Perl, (b) parsing with Perl regular expressions, (c) parsing with XML::Simple and sending the headlines to cell phones via WWW::SMS, (d) parsing via XSLT transformation. Python, PHP and ASP folks might feel left out due to the abundance of Perl examples, but if you got so far in the book, you can probably apply the regular expressions example or search for appropriate support for RSS format in your preferred language.

Going beyond the standard itself, RSS directories, aggregators and readers are discussed. Author makes a distinction between the last two by classifying Meerkat-like services into aggregators and desktop or Web applications designed to present the information to the user into readers. The chapter also provides information about Syndic8, its API, and describes the feed registration process. OReilly's Meerkat is also discussed in chapter, together with reference table for its API (you can make Meerkat generate HTML or RSS news headlines on certain topic or using certain keywords by providing a right query to its Web interface).

The book is quite a smooth read for a text describing the details of data specification. The chapters are informative and the book is not overloaded with useless information just to increase the page count. The tips are quite useful for someone, who is knew to the field and answers some questions not covered by standards (e.g., how often should you request an RSS feed, what to do if you're being screen-scraped, etc.)

I like the way the author divided the chapters into RSS 0.9x/2.0 and RSS 1.0 and kept two worlds apart. Most of the time you probably won't be interested in developing a feed to support both standards, but would like to focus just on one. The examples in Perl are perfect with me, although for someone new to Perl or programming in general those examples with abundant regular expressions might look a bit convoluted. Kudos to the author for not expanding on the topic, like many do, and providing an example of a script for RSS manipulation in every possible language out there.

What's missing? I wish more pages were dedicated to desktop RSS readers. FeedReader, HotSheet, Syndirella, Beaver and SharpReader are excellent end user applications currently gaining some popularity among those who'd prefer to browse the favorite headlines at a glance, instead of going to a dozen of sites every morning. To be fair, there's a huge list of readers in Appendix, and some applications mentioned above only came around in the last few months, which was probably after the book hit the press. Some sites also didn't make it into the book. I like DailyRotation and FreshNews that borrow from Meerkat's versatility and provide their own feed portal.

Overall, the book is a pretty good developer's guide to RSS standard. Accompanied with helpful illustrations and numerous tips it's an excellent resource for those unfamiliar with RSS and a helpful reference for those who have been doing Web syndication for a while.

You can purchase Content Syndication With RSS from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

is it just me?

[josephgrossberg]

Am I the only one who likes to view website/blog entries in their original context (where relevant) -- i.e. on the webpage where it was published -- even if it means I have a really long "links" list?

Presentation isn't everything, but it matters.

Re:is it just me?

[derch]

No, of course not. I like doing it to, but I've found that an RSS reader like NetNewsWire is the best way to keep up to date on blogs and news sites. Instead of visiting ten sites once or twice a day to see if new stories have been posted, the news reader just lets me know when new content is there. It also gives me the headlines - very useful when Slashdot carries crap stories for several days straight. A simple click of a menu item in NetNewsWire loads the story in a browser.

I've gone from manually keeping track of five main sites to letting the RSS reader track close to thirty sites.

/. Feed

[dmdx0a0d]

When is /. going to use the RSS standard instead of its current PITA XML format?

RSS is largely useless.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the problem I have with content syndication/RSS.

It is difficult for a non-professional or non-techie to implement someone else's feed on their site.

I have content that is updated all day long and there are probably hundreds (at a minimum) of users that would love to add my content to their site via an RSS feed. And it would drive a lot of people to my site, too.

Unfortunately, HTML is about as limited as most of these people get. A lot of them probably aren't even that far along - most likely using WYSIWYG HTML editors.

All the RDF/RSS feed grabbers/users that I have seen are fairly involved perl (or other language) scripts that require a nice chunk of work on the webmaster's side.

Until people can implement my feed on their site with no more difficulty than copying and pasting a few lines of pre-generated code, then it's useless.

List of RSS feeds?

[mortonda]

It seems like this would be a good way for major news outlets to draw traffic to their sites - if I could put a brief RSS generated bit of info on one of my web pages, people might click the link and go to the other web sites. So why can't I find any RSS feeds for major news sites like CNN and such?

Making an RSS feed is easy - I want to have RSS feeds of other more interesting sites avaiable to put in my own web pages. And that would benefit everyone, no?

Easy

[jimmyCarter]

I've noticed that with most blogs, the content is actually placed into the RSS (HTML tags and all in some cases). Some of the bigger sites that offer feeds (/., News.com, etc.) provide a headline and then maybe a 40 character summary.

In /.'s case, I'm consuimng the headlines via an aggregator, but all I'm seeing is a link and the article headline. I still go to the site to read the full content and the comments, so I'm still seeing the banner ads and such.

The key is putting limited information, so you can draw the user to the site if you're trying to generate revenu from your content. Then, you better hope the internal link referenced in the feed has some advertising.