November 2006
Intermediate to advanced
46 pages
1h 7m
English
Content preview from How to Build an RSS 2.0 FeedBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Anatomy of an RSS 2.0 Feed
The process of building an RSS 2.0 feed isn't complicated, but it does require that you understand the various elements and attributes defined in the RSS 2.0 specification. This chapter will take you through the components of an RSS feed, show how to use them, and highlight any best practices along the way. As you read, we will systematically construct an example RSS feed to illustrate what you have learned.
Note
Strictly speaking, the RSS 2.0 specification is imprecise at times. As a result, there can be various interpretations of how certain aspects of RSS should be implemented. This guide offers you a mainstream approach to RSS features wherever possible.
Learning by example is a great way to tackle RSS, so we'll use a hypothetical food web site called Seize Her Salad to walk through the building of a feed. Here is the scenario: The food mavens at Seize Her Salad want an RSS 2.0 feed to dish out their favorite recipe of the week. Before they invest a lot of programming time to generate a feed from their recipe database, they have decided to build one by hand to see what is involved.
We'll use this scenario as a case study to examine how to use the various features in RSS. (Be sure to check out the complete example feed at the end of this chapter.)
The RSS Document
Every RSS 2.0 feed is an XML document, so the very first line of our RSS feed must be an XML declaration. The XML declaration tells feed readers (and XML parsers in general) that what follows is ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.