RE: [ cf-dev ] XML feeds

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 02:33:46 -0700

Thanks Rich. I actually found something on www.devx.com which helped a lot but there code was a little shabby so looking at your code was a great help.

Cheers

Dave

At 09:41 6/17/2003 +0100, you wrote:
Hi Dave,

Luckily, to produce XML feeds doesn't take much knowledge of XML (its very
boring and I can't help fall asleep when people start talking about it)

So I'll tell you the layman's guide to producing feeds.

You have a couple of options. You can either produce the feed with the
fields you want to use (Custom XML), but for things like news releases, they
usually follow a standard format (title, author, date, content etc) and so
you can use the widely accepted RSS format (Rich Site Summary) that Netscape
created and then handed over to the people.

Lots and lots of aggregators (eg http://www.syndic8.com ) and feedreaders
(eg http://www.feedreader.com ) accept RSS, its all documented and premade,
so you don't have to worry about schemas, DTD's etc, you just create the
file.

I have an example at Funjunkie that works really well:
http://www.funjunkie.co.uk/news.xml

This feed is a static file generated by a simple Coldfusion page and saved
out as a .xml file.

Here's the code:

<cfcontent type="application/xml"><cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="yes">
<cfquery name="articles" datasource="#dsn#" dbtype="ODBC"
cachedwithin="#createtimespan(7,0,0,0)#">
EXEC front_page_articles
</cfquery>
<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="no"><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape Communications//DTD RSS 0.91//EN"
            "http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd";>
<rss version="0.91">
        <channel>
                <title>Funjunkie</title>
                <link>http://www.funjunkie.co.uk</link>
                <description>Irreverent, Offbeat Weblog</description>
                <language>en-gb</language>
                <copyright>Copyright 2003, funjunkie.co.uk. All Rights
Reserved</copyright>
                <managingEditor>[EMAIL PROTECTED]</managingEditor>
                <webMaster>[EMAIL PROTECTED]</webMaster>
                        <cfoutput query="articles" maxrows="15"><cfset
description = rereplacenocase(article_desc, "<[^>]*>", "", "ALL")>
                        <item>
                                <title>#xmlformat(title)#</title>

<link>http://www.funjunkie.co.uk/news_archive.cfm?date=#dateformat(date_publ
ish, 'mmyy')####article_id#</link>

<description>#xmlformat(description)#</description>
                        </item>
                        </cfoutput>
        </channel>
</rss>


and thats it! (watch out for wrap)

You can find an excellent list of RSS resources at
http://www.larkfarm.com/rss_resources.htm as well as a quickstart guide to
help you understand it more.

There are 3 versions of RSS which are produced by different people RSS 0.91
is probably still the most widely used, but you can publish in all the
formats to be safe (Funjunkie publishes in 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and in WDDX). Be
careful in thinking that the different versions relate to the chronological
updates to RSS. Unfortunately, theres a lot of bad blood in the XML world
with Dave Winer et al getting at each others throats and stabbing each other
in the back and so one camp is deleoping RSS 1.0 and the other is developing
RSS 2.0. In reality they're completely different. It makes it all very
confusing for developers and I wish they'd sort it the f out quite
personally.

Rich


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Phipps [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: 17 June 2003 07:30
> To: ColdFusion User group
> Subject: [ cf-dev ] XML feeds
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I am still getting to grips with XML and I have a client site
> that provides
> news releases via email to subscribers.  They are now
> requesting the option
> of XML feeds that would be available to remote sites to
> connect to.  I
> presume this is an ideal candidate for a web service. I am
> not quite sure
> where to start.  Can anyone point to some good online resources about
> putting together some basic XML feeds?  Has anyone done
> something similar
> they would care to share? (the site is for a reg'd charity
> and therefore
> funds are a little tight!)
>
> Thanks
>
> Dave
>
>
> --
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