RSS

(Really Simple Syndication)

By:Andi Sunyoto, M.Kom

Have You Find are Icons ?
RSS Icons
 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 et one can get this
information, and information from other various sources, in this
format.
‰ 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.
‰ RSS solves many problems webmasters commonly face, such
as increasing traffic, and gathering and distributing news. RSS
can also be the basis for additional content distribution
services.
‰ Who use RSS: BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney, Forbes, Motley Fool,
Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, ZDNet, and more.
RSS View in Mozilla Firefox
RSS View in Internet Explorer
‰ Kompas
ƒ http://www.kompas.com/getrss/nasional
‰ OkeZone
ƒ http://sindikasi.okezone.com/index.php/techno/RSS2.0
‰ Bhinneka
ƒ http://www.bhinneka.com/aspx/rss.ashx?c=BhinnekaPostProductRevie
ws
‰ Detik
ƒ http://rss.detik.com/index.php/detikcom
‰ BBC
ƒ http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml
‰ CNN
ƒ http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
 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.
And for the provider of the content, this allows it to send news
about its site.
 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.
And for the provider of the content, this allows it to send news
about its site.
 RSS, how it works?
‰ 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
ƒ 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...). See in resources. There is one that is
built with XUL.
ƒ 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.
‰ 2 - Using a feed on a website
ƒ The RSS feed is displayed as a list of titles (and optionally summaries).
ƒ A click on a title displays the new.
ƒ 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.
ƒ 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.
ƒ 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.
ƒ Use a specialized tool to extract the data from a page.
‰ To give access to the XML file, a link is displayed:
ƒ or
‰ <a type="application/rss+xml"
href="http://ww.xul.fr/rss.xml"> RSS feed for this
site</a>
ƒ Feeds in Atom format use the "application/atom+xml" value instead.
ƒ Replace xul.fr by the domain name of your site.
 Main RSS tags
‰ rss. The global container.
channel. A distributing channel. It has several descriptive tags
and holds one or several items.

‰ Required tags for the channel

ƒ title. The title of the channel. Should contains the name.
ƒ link. URL of the website that provides this channel.
ƒ description. Summary of what the provider is.
ƒ one item tag at least, for the content.
‰ Contoh Channel

‰ Optional tags for the channel

ƒ language. The human language used for the text.
ƒ docs. Where to find the doc for the format of the file, may be Harvard.
ƒ webMaster. E-mail.
ƒ pubDate. Publishing date.
ƒ etc. See in the specification for more.
 Items of the channel
‰ Each item tag must hold these tags:
ƒ title. Title of the article.
ƒ link. The URL of the page.
ƒ description. Summary of the article.

‰ And some optional info for this article

ƒ pubDate. Publishing date.
ƒ guid. A string of character that is unique to designate this item.
ƒ category. The category of the article.
ƒ etc.
Building its personal RSS feed, step by step
‰ At start, this is just a simple text file, created with any text
editor. But an XML editor is more convenient. (see at the
"software" page). The name may be, for example: "feed.xml".
The overall structure is as that:
 1) Define the source, by the channel tag
‰ The channel will be the same for all your RSS feeds. These tags
are required:
ƒ - title: the title of your website, may be the one in the title tag of the
home page.
- link: the URL of your website: example: http://www.xul.fr
- description: description of your website, about 200 characters, this
may be the text assigned to the content attribute of the description tag,
in the head section of the home page.
 2) Add an image
‰ This is optional. Design a small image (88x31 for example) in a
common format (gif, jpg, png) and put in into the same
directory that the RSS file.
‰ The "image" tag is a sub-element of the channel tag
ƒ - url is the address of the image itself.
- link is the address of the page displayed when one clicks on the
image.
 3) Add a new
‰ Now, we will add a web page to display an information. This is
an "item" tag, a sub-element of channel, and this components
are required:
ƒ - title: the title of the article.
ƒ - link: the URL of the page.
ƒ - description: a summary of the article, about 200 characters.
‰ 4) Add more items
ƒ More items may be added to this channel.
‰ 5) Upload the file
ƒ Put the feed.xml file into your website, among other web pages.
‰ 6) Validate the file
ƒ You may use this online RSS feed validator.
ƒ url: http://www.feedvalidator.org/
 7) Make it available
‰ This is accomplished by adding an RSS button on the home
page. A click on the button should display the XML file you
have created.
<a href="http://localhost/pweb/RSS/webref_rssphp">
<img src="rssicon.gif"> </a>
ƒ If the image is not displayed, use a complete URL, as
http://www.xul.fr/rss.gif, for example.
‰ 8) Updating the feed
‰ To publish further articles, you have just to add items, and
remove older ones to keep the number of articles constant.
 RSS Format
‰ RSS 2.0
ƒ Included in 2.0.1 - the latest stable version of this branch — are channel
metadata like link, title, description; image, which allows you to specify a
thumbnail image to display with the feed); webMaster and managingEditor, to
identify who’s responsible for the feed, and lastBuildDate, which shows when the
feed was last updated.
ƒ Example.
‰ RSS 1.0
ƒ RSS 1.0 stands for “RDF Site Summary.” This flavor of RSS incorporates RDF, a
Web standard for metadata. Because RSS 1.0 uses RDF, any RDF processor
can understand RSS without knowing anything about it in particular. This allows
syndicated feeds to easily become part of the Semantic Web.
ƒ Example.
‰ Atom
ƒ Both RSS 1.0 and 2.0 are informal specifications; that is, they aren’t published by
a well-known standards body or industry consortium, but instead by a small
group of people. Atom is functionally similar to both branches of RSS, and is also
an XML-based format.
ƒ Example.
Contents

1 Click to add Title

2 Click to add Title

3 Click to add Title

4 Click to add Title

 Hot Tip

‰ How do I incorporate my logo to a slide that will

apply to all the other slides?

ƒ On the [View] menu, point to [Master], and then click [Slide

Master] or [Notes Master]. Change images to the one you like,
then it will apply to all the other slides.
Diagram

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Diagram

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 Diagram

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