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Content Syndication With RSS
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.
As both an aggregator and provider of content, I can safely say an entire book need not be devoted to the subject. Maybe a pamphlet. I guarantee this book is 90% fluff.
Not to be a troll, but it really is cheaper if you buy it here.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
I think the ability to easily transfer information in real time is just going to grow with time, this is not a fast fad.
Go calculate something!
my first post ownz you all. boo-yea
RSS is forked, the book examples are in Perl, and I should buy a whole book to do something as (should be) simple as syndication? Don't think so. By the way, how many people are actually using Perl anymore for web development? CGI and Perl feel so out of date now.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Thi book starts out with the basic techniques that all fags know, but in the later chapters it moves into the advanced stuff like:
CHPT 5: How to pick up young black boys
CHPT 7: Digesting large amounts of semen
CHPT 8: Satisfying the Goatse man
CHPT 10: Hiding AIDs with makeup and lies
I highly recommend this book if you enjoy an occasional pee sprout in your poop chute.
[note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It's wh
It's called the 'free market', slashmods. Perhaps you've heard of it?
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.
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
When is /. going to use the RSS standard instead of its current PITA XML format?
Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo." .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." .rpms together on the command line, and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
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FYI...RSS is also the name of a Nazi group in India that was allies with the German Nazis during World War 2 and is also affiliated with the current ruling BJP party.
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.
Here's Slashdot's current RSS page:
h dot.org0 0:00
1 050
c 1050
1 050
0 50
Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/
News for nerds, stuff that matters
en-us
Copyright 1997-2001, OSDN
2003-04-21T16:33:48+00:00
OSDN
pater@slas
Technology
hourly
1
1970-01-01T00:00+
Your Headline Reader Has Been Banned
http://slashdot.org/faq/accounts.shtml#ac
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow. Please see the FAQ link for more information, and if you email us, include your IPID MD5: 2be13864b6e87d2ec6b4701261c83663.
You May Only Load Headlines Every 30 Minutes
http://slashdot.org/faq/accounts.shtml#a
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow. Please see the FAQ link for more information, and if you email us, include your IPID MD5: 2be13864b6e87d2ec6b4701261c83663.
In 72 Hours, Your Ban Will Be Lifted
http://slashdot.org/faq/accounts.shtml#ac
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow. Please see the FAQ link for more information, and if you email us, include your IPID MD5: 2be13864b6e87d2ec6b4701261c83663.
Do Not Bother Contacting Us For 72 Hours
http://slashdot.org/faq/accounts.shtml#ac1
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow. Please see the FAQ link for more information, and if you email us, include your IPID MD5: 2be13864b6e87d2ec6b4701261c83663.
So apparently we've not only succeeded in slashdotting Slashdot, we've gotten Slashdot to give us multiple duplicate posts! WE WIN!
Someone you trust is one of us.
How are sites that offer a Semantic Web interface such as RSS supposed to bring in revenue? They can't rely on advertising because the machines that browse the Semantic Web cannot be trusted to deliver advertising to a human eyeball.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Slashdot has been blocking my rss aggregator for about 2 weeks -- despite the fact that my aggregator is set to every 4 hours. The sad thing is I didn't really care because the RSS summaries were pretty crap. Not putting the full article summary (which in most cases is the article) is bad, Stopping in the middle of a sentence to do it is really bad...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Text Ads
Are you saying put these in a separate section of the feed, where a machine can easily filter them out? Or would you put them in the main part of the feed itself, indistinguishable from a normal link, a practice which got a few search engines accused of corruption?
do I really owe you advertising bucks if all you do is link?
Try telling that to any major directory such as Yahoo!.
Alot of sites (the majority?) that offer RSS feeds are not designed to make money
In other words, the dot-com revenue model of "give away your product and make it up selling T-shirts". Or am I misled?
Will I retire or break 10K?
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?
Password protected feeds add real value to RSS for obvious reasons. You won't always want everyone to read your feeds
Diarist.com offers a HTTP Password protected RSS feed here. http://rsstest.diarist.com/
As I write this... There are only two RSS clients which can read it's passworded feeds.
1. NewsGator
2. A beta version of FeedReader
Free Web based FTP
except slashdot's rss policy is shit.
1) Write an advertisement and disguise it as a "review."
2) Publish advertisement on web site as a real news story.
3) ??????
4) Profit!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I wrote a module for my site that caches headlines from feeds you enter in.
Check it out.
(You need to register to edit the feeds you want to subscribe to)
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Cheers,
Mike
www.jmagar.com
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I would love to find an RSS source for a sports scoreboard. I have looked everywhere and all I can find are sports headlines. Anyone no of a source?
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.
/.'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.
In
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.
-- jimmycarter
Everything in this post is correct. I fail to see reasons for negative moderation.
Why bother.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Just to let you know: Full featured RSS support ist scheduled for KDE 3.2. See http://dot.kde.org/1049415292/ for more information.
This will include a RSS dcop service providing a powerful XML-RPC interface to www.syndic8.com, a new RSS konqueror sidebar and a rewritten knewsticker.
Currently everything is still under development but already quite useful (if you know how to deal with dcop...). Let's hope we will have everything finished before KDE 3.2.
if so, give up programming and computers *NOW*. and go find another job, please!?!
Syndic8.com is a very useful resource if you want to search for a syndicated version of your favorite site(s) or just check out some random feeds. Even if the site doesn't generate its own RSS you can often find a 3rd party "scraped" feed. (I know that FARK for instance doesn't use RSS)
Not only can you read any users entries at:
www.livejournal.com/users/andrewducker/rss
but they syndicate over 1000 feeds in return. For instance you can add Slashdot to your friends list by adding user "Slashdot" or going to:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/slashdot/
I now read nearly all my news through syndication - you can see my total news feed at http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/news
Syndication has my news gathering a whole lot easier.
My Journal
Slashdot's Palm page in an iframe is a nice solution for your personal starting page - if anyone still has such a thing.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
I thought it was my aggregator too, but it turns out that it was Evolution, which was fetching every 10 minutes, even though I never read the summary.
/. readers refresh index.html, which is a larger file, several times an hour.
I think 30 minutes is a bit harsh, given the fact that many
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
It would be great if they sent the headline, the section and the first paragraph. That way I could look and see what articles I wanted to read. It's hard to tell what the article is about from just the headline (right Taco???)
Can anyone recommend a good RSS reader? I'd prefer webbased so I can just host it on my box w/apache and read my news from anywhere. Any tips? Thanks! cuban
check out www.newsblob.com It's another general purpose daily news RSS feed site.
Kind of useful, written entirely in Perl, and I've tried it on a Linux box with no problems. Not sure if it'll work with other OSes, but its worth a shot.
Go grab the two perl scripts and the cron job if need be.
http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/
it's everything you want, and then some. open-source (perl -- not just that, READABLE perl!)
ThinkGeek.com has an RSS feed
http://www.thinkgeek.com/thinkgeek.rdf
Where you can view all the latest stuff.
The advertising industry needs to get more up-to-date,
this isn't the 1950s anymore, and the general
advertising ballgame hasn't changed.