Introduction to RSS:
WebRef and RSS



We've been preaching the gospel of RSS for some time now at Webref, but lately we've got religion. Our Perl expert, Jonathan Eisenzopf, has been active in promoting RSS, even writing a Perl module for easy manipulation of RSS files, XML::RSS. Doc JavaScript has gone daily with his popular JavaScript Tip of the Day channel, and our XML expert, as you can imagine, has his own channel, and has created a Java applet for displaying RSS feeds.

We've adapted News Harvester to accept and output RSS files, and now use a modified version of Jon's channel manager script to update our front page and RSS file simultaneously. Now updating our front page is just a Web form away, and you can do the same for your site. To encourage the spread of RSS we're providing our channel manager script as open source:

http://www.webreference.com/scripts/

The Future of RSS

Thanks to the efforts of the likes of Jonathan Eisenzopf, Dave Winer and Netscape, future versions of RSS will incorporate popular additional fields like news category, time stamps, and more. With thousands of sites now RSS-enabled and more on the way, RSS has become perhaps the most visible XML success story to date. RSS democratizes news distribution by making everyone a potential news provider. It leverages the Web's most valuable asset, content, and makes displaying high-quality relevant news on your site easy. Soon we'll see RSS portals with user-rated channels, cool RSS site of the day, build your own topic-specific portal, and highly relevant search engines. A collective weblog would be another intriguing possibility. May the best content win.

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About the author: Andrew B. King is the founder and former managing editor of WebReference.com and JavaScript.com. He has a BSME and MSME from the University of Michigan, and has worked the Web full time since 1993. He can be reached at [email protected].

Further Reading:

Doc JavaScript's JavaScript Tip of the Day Channel
Exploring XML - Syndication intro, RSS Viewer applet
Meerkat Open Wire Service - O'Reilly's tech-oriented RSS news portal
Mother of Perl - XML::RSS tutorial, RSS tools, and scripts
News Harvester - accepts and outputs RSS, provides news clients for news harvester feeds (see the news topics links for available feeds)
RSS Resources - includes RSS portal list
WebReference.com RSS Channels