News Feed
A news feed of the News page for the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2002:
The Pervasive Web Web site is available.
The address of the news feed is
http://rss.blogspace.com/blogify?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ukoln.ac.uk%2Fweb-focus%2Fevents%2Fworkshops%2Fwebmaster-2002%2Fnews.html&last=1
Note that the file listed above is created dynamically. A static version of
the file is available at
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/iwmw-2002-news.xml
However it should be noted that the static file, which is created through a manual
process, is not always up-to-date.
Why?
The newsfeed provides an automated way in which the latest information about the
Institutional Web Management Workshop can be accessed without having to
visit the Web site.
The news feed is available in a structured format, known as RSS (RDF Site Summary).
This is an XML application which has been developed for syndicated news feeds.
How?
Their are many ways in which a RSS newds feed could be created: you could use an
RSS (or XML editor); RSS could be created using a Content Management System; RSS
could be created by converting text from another format, such as XHTML; etc.
The RSS file on this Web site is created on-th-fly using a remote service
which converted very-lightly stucture HTML into RSS. This very simple approach has
been taken in order to demonstrate a very simple lightweight way to creating RSS.
The approach can be used by HTML authors and requires no additional tools or
knowledge.
A portion of the news page is shown below:
In order for a news fragment to be included in the RSS file the HTML <span>
tag is wrapped about the news fragment as shown belor:
<span class="rss:item"> ... </span>
The Syndicate Your Page service is used to transform the HTML found in the <span>
tag into RSS. This transformation takes place on-the-fly, when a user clicks on the
link.
Viewing
You will need an RSS viewer in order to view an RSS file.
Several RSS viewers are available. Some are designed to work on an Web site.
These are typically implemented either as a CGI script or in Java or JavaScript.
However RSS files do not have to be viewed using a Web browser - there are also
dedicated RSS viewers which can be used.
An example of a dedicated RSS viewer (Feedreader) is shown below.
Figure 1: The Newsfeed RSS Viewer
An advantage of dedicated RSS viewers can be the additional functionality they
provide. For example, Feedreader will display new news as a pop-up display in the
MS Windows tool bar, as shown below.
Figure 2: Automated Display of New RSS Infomation
RSS Viewers Developed at UKOLN
UKOLN has developed two RSS viewers: RSSxpress
is a CGI-based viewer (and authoring tool) and
RSSxpress Lite, which is an RSS
viewer implemented in Javascript.
Limitations Of This Approach
It should be pointed out that there are limitations of the approach to created RSS
documented here. The service is reliant on an external service, and it is not
possible to modify the way the service works.
Further Information
Further information on RSS is available:
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