RSS Feeds

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

RSS versions and recommendations
Version	Owner	Pros	Status	Recommendation
0.90	Netscape		Obsoleted by 1.0	Don't use
0.91	UserLand	Drop dead simple	Officially obsoleted by 2.0, but still quite popular	Use for basic syndication. Easy migration path to 2.0 if you need more flexibility
0.92, 0.93, 0.94	UserLand	Allows richer metadata than 0.91	Obsoleted by 2.0	Use 2.0 instead
1.0	RSS-DEV Working Group	RDF-based, extensibility via modules, not controlled by a single vendor	Stable core, active module development	Use for RDF-based applications or if you need advanced RDF-specific modules
2.0	UserLand	Extensibility via modules, easy migration path from 0.9x branch	Stable core, active module development	Use for general-purpose, metadata-rich syndication

What does a feed look like?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>

– <!–

 generator="FeedCreator 1.7.2"

–> f(clean);

– <rss version="2.0">

– <channel>

<title>The Book of Threes</title>

<description>A Subject Referrence Tricyclopedia of concepts that come
in threes . . .</description>

<generator>FeedCreator 1.7.2</generator>

– <image>

<url>http://threes.com/cms/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png</url>

<title>The Book of Threes</title>

<description>A Subject Referrence Tricyclopedia of concepts that come
in threes . . .</description>

</image>

– <item>

<title>Contribute</title>

<description>Becomming a contributor to the The Book of Threes is easy.
Register for a free account (index.php?option=com_registration
task=register) to begin….</description>

<category>Newsflashes – Threesflash</category>

</item>

– <item>

<title>Conceptualize</title>

<description>Human beings use threes to conceptualize everything.
Three data points are enough to describe an entire set. Take time for
example. We break…</description>

<category>Newsflashes – Threesflash</category>

</item>

– <item>

<title>Communicate</title>

<description>Join our site and share your ideas. Engage people from
around the world. Communicate. After you register for a free…
</description>

<category>Newsflashes – Threesflash</category>

</item>

– <item>

<title>Welcome to threes.com</title>

<category>News – Latest</category>

</item>

</channel>