book

Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

by Ben Hammersley

April 2005

Intermediate to advanced

270 pages

7h 13m

English

O'Reilly Media, Inc.

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1.2.1. HotSauce: MCF and RDF1.2.2. Channel Definition Format1.2.3. RSS First Appears1.2.4. The Standards Evolve1.2.5. The First Fork1.2.6. The Second Fork1.2.7. Pie, Echo, Necho, Atom1.2.8. Today’s Scene
1.4.1. If You Are Scraped
2.1.1. Bloglines2.1.2. Kinja2.1.3. Rocketinfo RSS Reader
2.2.1. NetNewsWire2.2.2. FeedDemon2.2.3. NewsMonster
2.3.1. Mobile Devices2.3.2. Email Clients2.3.3. Feed-Based Search Engines
3.2.1. Google3.2.2. Google News3.2.3. Yahoo!
4.2.1. Required Channel Subelements4.2.2. Optional Channel Subelements4.2.3. item Elements4.2.4. The Simplest Possible RSS 2.0 Feed
4.4.1. blogChannel Module4.4.2. Creative Commons Module4.4.3. Simple Semantic Resolution Module4.4.4. Trackback Module4.4.5. ICBM Module4.4.6. Yahoo!’s Media RSS Module
4.5.1. Creating RSS with Perl Using XML::RSS4.5.1.1. guid, Permalink or not4.5.1.2. Module support under XML::RSS4.5.2. Creating RSS 2.0 with PHP4.5.2.1. Caching and saving4.5.2.2. Dates4.5.2.3. Namespaced modules4.5.3. Creating RSS 2.0 with Ruby4.5.4. Serving RSS 2.0
5.1.1. Using URIs in RSS
5.2.1. Resources, PropertyTypes, and Properties5.2.2. Nodes and Arcs5.2.3. Fitting RDF to RSS
5.3.1. The Root Element5.3.2. <element rdf:about="URI OF ELEMENT">5.3.3. <element rdf:resource="URI” />5.3.4. RDF Containers5.3.4.1. rdf:Bag5.3.4.2. rdf:Seq5.3.4.3. rdf:Alt
5.4.1. Walking Through an RSS 1.0 Document
5.5.1. The Basic Structure5.5.2. The Root Element5.5.3. <channel rdf:about=""> (a Subelement of rdf:RDF)5.5.3.1. Required subelements of channel5.5.4. <image rdf:resource=""> (a Subelement of rdf:RDF)5.5.5. <textinput rdf:about=""> (a Subelement of rdf:RDF)5.5.6. <item rdf:about=""> (a Subelement of rdf:RDF)5.5.7. The Simplest Possible RSS 1.0 Feed
5.6.1. Creating RSS 1.0 with Perl5.6.2. Producing RSS 1.0 with PHP
7.1.1. The Structure of an Atom Feed7.1.1.1. The Atom entry7.1.1.2. Combining entries to make a feed7.1.2. The Reusable Syntax of Constructs
7.2.1. The Elements of Atom Entry7.2.2. The Atom Feed Document in Detail7.2.3. The Simplest Possible Thing That Will Actually Work
7.3.1. Validating Atom Feeds
8.1.1. Converting Atom to RSS
8.2.1. RSS XPress8.2.2. Other Examples to Try
8.3.1. PHP: MagpieRSS8.3.1.1. Using MagpieRSS8.3.2. Python: The Universal Feed Parser8.3.2.1. A complete aggregator in 40 lines8.3.3. Perl: XML::Simple8.3.3.1. Parsing RSS as simply as possible
8.7.1. Enabling Server-Side Includes Within Apache 1.3.x8.7.2. Server-Side Includes with Microsoft IIS
9.1.1. Publish a Link9.1.2. Enabling Autodiscovery9.1.3. Serving a Feed Correctly9.1.3.1. MIME types9.1.3.2. HTTP 1.19.1.3.2.1. Compression9.1.3.2.2. Conditional GET9.1.3.3. RSScache.com9.1.4. Registering with Aggregators9.1.5. Metadata for the Main Page9.1.6. Counting Hits and Clickthroughs
9.2.1. Publish and Subscribe Within RSS 2.09.2.2. Publish and Subscribe with RSS 1.0
9.4.1. LinkpimpListener.pl
10.1.1. Walking Through the Code10.1.2. The Entire Listing
10.2.1. Walking Through the Code10.2.2. The Entire Listing
10.3.1. Walking Through the Code10.3.2. The Entire Listing
10.4.1. Walking Through the Code10.4.2. The Entire Listing
10.5.1. Walking Through the Code10.5.2. The Entire Listing
10.6.1. Walking Through the Code10.6.2. The Entire Listing
10.7.1. Walking Through the Code10.7.2. The Entire Listing
10.8.1. Walking Through the Code10.8.2. The Entire Listing
10.9.1. Walking Through the Code10.9.2. The Entire Listing
10.12.1. How to Use It10.12.2. The Code Itself
10.14.1. Walking Through the Code10.14.2. The Entire Listing
11.1.1. Differences from RSS 1.0
11.2.1. What Do We Know?11.2.2. Can We Express This Data Already?11.2.3. Putting the New Elements to Work with RSS 2.011.2.4. Putting the New Elements to Work with RSS 1.011.2.5. Documentation
11.4.1. Installing AmphetaDesk11.4.2. index.html
A.2.1. Elements and AttributesA.2.2. Name SyntaxA.2.3. Well-FormednessA.2.4. CommentsA.2.5. Entity ReferencesA.2.6. Character ReferencesA.2.7. Character EncodingsA.2.7.1. Unicode encoding schemesA.2.7.2. Other character encodingsA.2.8. ValidityA.2.8.1. Document type definitions (DTDs)A.2.9. Putting It TogetherA.2.10. XML Namespaces
A.3.1. Selecting a ParserA.3.2. XSLT Processors

Content preview from Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

The Basic Structure

The top level of an RSS 2.0 document is the rss version="2.0" element. This is followed by a single channel element. The channel element contains the entire feed contents and all associated metadata.

Required Channel Subelements

There are 3 required and 16 optional subelements of channel within RSS 2.0. Here are the required subelements:

title

The name of the feed. In most cases, this is the same name as the associated web site or service.

<title>RSS and Atom</title>

link

A URL pointing to the associated resource, usually a web site. The link must be an IANA-registered URI scheme, such as http://, https://, news://, or ftp://, though it isn’t necessary for a application developer to support all these by default. The most common by a large margin is http://. For example:

<link>http://www.benhammersley.com</link>

description

Some words to describe your channel.

<description>This is a nice RSS 2.0 feed of an even nicer weblog</description>

Although it isn’t explicitly stated in the specification, it is highly recommended that you do not put anything other than plain text in the channel/title or channel/description elements. There are some existing feeds with HTML within those elements, but these cause a considerable amount of wailing, and at least a small amount of gnashing of teeth. Do not do it. Use plain text only in these elements. The following sidebar, “Including HTML Within title or description,” gives a fuller account of this, but in my opinion it’s a bad idea. ...