Wednesday, 1st June 2005
Setup RSS Feed to my site
Today i was determined to setup the RSS Feed for my site. I knew it was a fairly easy task (given that you are XML savvy).
For those of you who dont know what RSS is, it is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. (earlier known as Rich Site Summary)
On the end user level, all of us can relate to the considerable amount of time consumed by our daily surfing ritual. Most people have a stable of web sites that they visit on a regular basis and in some cases, several times daily. For each site the process if fairly identical: visit the site, weave their way through the sea of advertisements, navigate to interesting section and finally actually read the article. Repeat the process numerous times and the thing you know, a fair amount of time has passed. Furthurmore, given the highly tedious process, its easy to neglect a particular information resource for days, potentially missing something of interest.
The RSS format allows quick and easy syndication of news, headlines, and more. RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification.RSS offers a formalized means for encapsulating a web site's content with an XML based structure. This XML files is known as a feed.
RSS feeds are based on the observation that most site information shares a similar format, regardless of topic.
A typical RSS feed embodies attributes such as title, author, publishDate, URL etc. With just the feed's URL, the user can store it, into a software tool capable of retrieving and parsing the feed.
Several standalone RSS aggregator applications exist such as RSSReader.Mozilla Thunderbird is the e-mail client i use (since it is free and i like it) which allows you to read RSS Feeds similar to how you read an E-Mail.For instructions on how to add RSS Feeds to Thunderbird click here.
The URL For my RSS Feed is /rss/nikhilzkingdom.xml.
I had a fairly easy time setting up the RSS Feed.I quickly whipped through RSS 2.0 Specification and read up whatever little i felt i needed to know, to get up and running. I coded two small routines. One to fetch the recent few articles and another to update the RSS Feed File with them.
I had to content with complaint about a UTF Encoding in one of the XML Files. I traced it down to the post on 2004-11-16 which had the HTML & nbsp; which is the entity used to represent a non-breaking space. The web def says it is "A space is a punctuation convention for providing interword separation in some scripts, including the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic. ".For some reason it was not encoded using UTF-8 in the original article file. btw the article was hand written XML, not generated, all posts before May 2005 were ported from the old site by hand, transforming the HTML content in them into XML CDATA Sections.Apparenlty at this point the wrong encoding was used by my text editor CrimsonEditor.
But now that the RSS Feed is up and running. I am glad since it was one of my original ambitions to have one.
Herez a screenshot of the RSS Feed in Mozilla Thunderbird and .
Different RSS Feeds render the feeds differently. As can be seen from RSS Reader and Mozilla Thunderbird. Personally i like the way thunderbird renders it.
Posted by Nikhil on Wednesday, 1st June 2005 in TechnoBabble