What is RSS?
It is a format to share data, defined in the 1.0 version of XML. You can deliver information in this format at one
can get this information, and information from other various sources, in this
format. (With RSS it is possible to distribute up-to-date web content from one web site to thousands of other web sites around the world.) Information provided by a website in an XML file is called an RSS
feed.
Recent browsers can read directly RSS files, but a special RSS reader
or aggregator may be used too.
History
Created by Netscape in 1999. The first version is 0.90. Followed by the 0.91
version that has been improved by the Userland company in 2000.
In 2000 the version 1.0 based on RDF was created by O'Reilly and further maintained
by the RSS-DEV group, and named RDF Site Summary.
RSS 2.0 was defined by Dave Winer (previously worker at Userland) at Harvard
University in 2002.
This page is based on the Really Simple Syndication, 2.01 specification
from Harvard.
Why use RSS?
To get information or news provided by websites in a format
computers can process. To display it on a website or to read it
yourself. Without RSS, users will have to check your site daily for new updates. This may be too time-consuming for many users. With an RSS feed (RSS is often called a News feed or RSS feed) they can check your site faster using an RSS aggregator (a site or program that gathers and sorts out RSS feeds).
And for the provider of the content, this allows it to send news
about its site.
RSS, how it works?
The RSS system to publish articles and news over the web is very simple:
- There are firstly some web pages, one want to be displayed
by other websites.
This set of pages is the RSS feed. - An XML file that defines the RSS feed. This file holds URL, title and summary of each page to display.
- A person which want to read the feed on its computer. He (she) uses an RSS reader or its browser and just adds the feed with the proper command of its software.
- Or another website that wants to display the feed. It has to load the RSS file from the provider, to extract URL of pages, and display titles and summaries. This may be performed by a PHP script.
- When someone visits the website of the receiver, the script is launched, it recalls the RSS file from the provider's website and displays a list of news from extracted data.
- By a click on a line of the list, visitors display a page from the provider.
Structure of an RSS document
It is an XML file and the global container is the "RSS" tag for
the 2.0 format.
The file holds one channel at least, this is the website that provides the
information.
The channel provides some articles or data. These are web pages from the same
site, or from other sites.
How to use RSS?
1 - Using RSS on a desktop
RSS feeds are displayed by Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. An RSS reader
(or aggregator) may also be installed on the operating system (Windows, Linux,
Mac OS, etc...).
Accessing the content depends upon the reader. This may be accomplished
just by a click on an "add" button to get the URL of
the RSS feed, and let it added to a list of feeds.
The RSS feed is displayed as a list of titles (and optionally summaries). A click on a title displays the new. Titles are updated automatically. A script in PHP or other language, builds the list each time the page is displayed by loading the RSS file and extracting the data from it. Some links to such tools are provided in resources.
How to publish news in an RSS feed?
There are several means to generate RSS feeds.
- Using the RSS library of PHP. A PHP script will build the XML file from
titles and descriptions of pages from the content of a page.
- Use a specialized tool to extract the data from a page.
Feeds in Atom format use the "application/atom+xml" value instead.
Replace shivajisoft.com by the domain name of your site.
In next part (Part-II) of RSS, you will learn more about tags used to create RSS feed.
Conclusion :
I hope that this article would have helped you to learn about RSS, its usage and simple way to publish that for websites. Your feedback and constructive contributions are always welcome.
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