Really Simple RSS
I’ve been chatting to a friend about how to incorporate RSS with an existing site, and ways in which the technology can be applied.
You almost always hear about RSS being used where the XML is generated server-side using a technology like ASP.NET or PHP and querying a database. This is fairly familiar if you’re a programmer, or using a blogging product. However if you have an existing static site without a database, it seems like quite a lot of hassle to go down this route simply to provide an information feed.
However, RSS just requires an XML document that adheres to a particular format to be accessible via HTTP. There is no reason why this can’t be a static document that is maintained like any other static resource on your site.
For some reason I hadn’t really even thought about that before – I’d always figured that manually maintaining an XML document isn’t really a fun night out for most people. However, there are various utilities available which put a friendly interface on top of the generation of an XML document using the RSS schema. Some also have FTP features so that you can upload and replace an existing hosted feed file.
I think it’s definately less maintenance long term if you auto-generate your feed from a database, but if you have hosting constraints or just want to offer RSS without getting at all complex I think this can be a really good approach.
Yeah its definately useful to update content using an RSS feed. I mentioned that I am currently transforming my flash website from a something which reads content from editable text files to something more web 2.0 which draws content from external XML sources like MSN Spaces and Google Calendar. This allows me to have the convenience of the web services and the freedom to display the data as I wish.
I was having trouble with the limited XML formatting from Google Calendar. I since found that there are ‘basic’ and ‘full’ versions of the feed, the full version splits the data into more useful tags.
I read a bit more about the GData protocol too. Its mostly over my head, but looks like they are doing some interesting things that allow you to send a query or update the data.
Comment by Matt, October 1, 2006 @ 8:04 am
I like how it’s quite simple to integrate the work of others without having to duplicate and reinvent from scratch every time you want a similar feature on your site.
I was thinking a little about how to build a site where users submit video and it’s made available for streaming. This is actually a little more involved than I initially thought – receiving submissions in a variety of formats, queueing up submitted work and transcoding to a suitable streaming format, then copying over to a dedicated streaming server.
However, if this was for a small site you could build on something like YouTube via the APIs and skip a large portion of the work.
I’m using the Flickr API for the pics on the homepage of this site, and it just makes it much more convenient to upload new content. It’s nothing that I couldn’t have written myself, but there’s no point in wasting time duplicating effort.
There’s sometimes concern over adding external dependencies to your site, but I think it’s often the case that the external services are actually more reliable than the site into which they’re integrated.
Right, now I’m so excited about web 2.0 I’m going to run off and build a potato mashup.
Comment by Oli, October 1, 2006 @ 10:39 am