Hi Wayne,
Yes, basically RSS is just specially formatted XML being served up
(dynamically or statically) by a normal webserver using HTTP.
The RSS feed spec is a moving target, but the following link is
considered the most authoritative. It was written by Dave Winer (the
so-called inventor)
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html
But be mindful of the numerous extensions and namespaces that have
been added over the years by others that came late to the party.
Unfortunately I don't think there is any one source for these extras.
After working on several projects that involve RSS feeds (not readers)
I would just say pay particular attention to how you assign your
"Date" elements by testing your feed with several of the popular news
readers - because when the dates are not set properly, your feed can
appear duplicated in some readers or continuously get re-flagged as
"new". This will be the most common complaint of subscribers to your
feed.
If you have a news reader already, get a HTTP sniffer utility of some
kind and watch the incoming RSS XML when the reader is updating. This
will give you some great example XML to work from. I recommend http://www.fiddler2.com/
if you're on Windows. I recently came across http://www.charlesproxy.com/
for Mac, but haven't tried it yet.
As well, if you're on Windows, I would recommend http://www.rssbandit.org/
as a great reader for testing. This project is maintained by Dare
Obasanjo, considered one of the top XML people at Microsoft. Plus I
think the help documentation for this product comes with some RSS spec
information (I think, it's been awhile since I installed it).
Hope that helps.
Scott,
On Aug-5-2008, at 10:21 PM, Wayne Irvine wrote:
On 06/08/2008, at 11:11 AM, Stefan Gonick wrote:
If you are talking about generating an RSS feed, then I can't help
you. :)
It's funny, my Google of RSS resulted in a load of Reader responses
but very little in the way of Publishing.
It is actually publishing I am interested in.
Cheers
Wayne
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