The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Developing Web Feeds with RSS and Atom - for the bookshelf Major Keary |
A recent title published by O'Reilly, Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom, may sound esoteric, but as the preface says RSS and Atom are "... the two most popular content-syndication technologies. From distributing the latest website content to your desktop and powering loosely coupled applications on the Internet, to providing the building blocks of the Semantic Web, these two technologies are among the Internet's fastest growing". The first half of the book discusses RSS and the second half discusses Atom.
Syndicate, as a verb, has a few meanings, one of which is simultaneous publication in a number of newspapers or magazines. In the language of the web syndication feeds refers to arrangements whereby content is distributed by a 'feed'. Another term used in that context is 'aggregator', and there are sites that enable users to subscribe to selected news feeds. The Bloglines aggregator offers subscriptions to selected RSS-enabled blogs (for more information go to http://www.bloglines.com).
Being a passive receiver of syndication feeds is one thing, syndicating your own website is another. There
are advantages discussed in RSS and Atom for syndicating one's own content.
The book is about using XML to create RSS feeds, producing feeds in the enterprise, keeping up with developments in the Semantic Web, and other aspects of syndication feeds. The intended audience is web developers and web site authors, and developers who want to "build applications that produce feeds as their output". That suggests highly technical content. The book does discuss, in considerable depth, the technical aspects of feed technology; however, informed lay readers should not have any difficulty in understanding the concepts. It is not rocket science. Familiarity with XML is assumed, and most of the many and extensive code examples are written in Perl. It is not necessary to use Perl, and the code is amply annotated for those who prefer some other language.
If you have your own website (personal or business), or run a blog, it is worth reading RSS and Atom even if the code examples are over your head for the insights it provides into what technology is used for syndicated feeds and how it is used, and alternative ways of doing things. Feeds can be set up without the need for programming, a topic discussed in a brief chapter that includes useful URLs. Another chapter, Unconventional Feeds, is interesting for its examples of applications with fully annotated code that individual users can implement; one of them sets up a feed reader to collect a 'wishlist' from Amazon (the wishlist is that of the author's wife and "is required reading for Christmas, birthdays, ...". Other examples are a FedEx parcel tracker and "an ever-updating list of recently modified files".
There are two appendices. One is a tutorial on XML that covers the essential elements required for RSS, and contains an interesting note on Unicode. The other is a list of useful sites and software.
|
Ben Hammersley: Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom ISBN 0-596-00881-3 Published by O'Reilly, 253 pp., RRP $74.95 incl. GST |
 |
Reprinted from the March 2006 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
