What's RSS?

[tonyh]

What's RSS? And why does it seem so huge now? It's like everywhere I go, even some of my favourite site for years, are now offering RSS optional links.

Other than being a "news feeder", what is it? Why is it gaining popularity?

Same questions about "blogs". What makes these weblogs any different than a standard news update or guest book?

Are these similar to "accessibility issues" where they are becoming a "must" for modern pages?

[buntine]

Instead of explaining my basic, and therefore somewhat wrong, knowledge of RSS, i will just point you to someone who really knows whats going on.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html

Regards,
Andrew Buntine.

[ray326]

Really Simple Syndication

The push for it is that it allows you to automatically include the latest info from multiple other sites into your site. It's used for "news" feeds but it's more general than that.

The main difference with blogs is usually (not always) that they are back-ended by some kind of CMS that lets you update the blog site with only a web browser. That bit of the functionality is much like a guest book interface. Personally I like wikis better than most other CMS-like software.

These are important tools but not as important as the thrust for proper site construction. They are definitely not a "must".

[tonyh]

Originally posted by ray326
Really Simple Syndication
Ah, and I'll read buntine's link later as well.

Personally I like wikis better than most other CMS-like software.
What is CMS and wikis?

Why would you want to include info from other sites into your own? Isn't that plagarism? Why not just reference this other content via anchor?

These are important tools but not as important as the thrust for proper site construction. They are definitely not a "must".
There just there to say "because I can" :D ?

And I forgot to ask, what about shoutbox's? From what I've seen, they just seem to be form based interfaces to blogs/guest books. Is this pretty much it?

Are such tools software or scipting? Can they be built with server side scripts, so those with client side disabled can still take advantage of them?

What are the benifits of using such tools?

[PeOfEo]

a cms is a content management system, a way to control all or most of the content on your page without editing any code, it does this by storeing data in data bases. Shoutboxes are like streamlined guestbooks, blogs generally have a threaded comment, that is the difference between a guest book and a bog. It is scripting, not software, ASP PHP ASP.NET JSP CGI cold fusion are the most common forms of server side scripting and all can do what you seek. You can do server side scripting in notepad, you do not need special editors, though I prefer to use dreamweaver because I feel comfortable scripting in it. Also all of what we mentioned must be done server side, in this case it is not a question of client side support, but rather client side scripting is too limited, you cant alter data bases with clinet side scripting or access server variables, so on and so fourth.
BTW: rss is made to be easy to put content on other sites, so they can put headlines on and such I guess. I do not see much point in useing it for my purposes, but you will see it in a lot of places http://msdn.microsoft.com/ look at the top. <plug>asp.net can output an rss feed with one line of code.</plug>

[ray326]

Why would you want to include info from other sites into your own? Isn't that plagarism? Why not just reference this other content via anchor? In fact that's what happens. The RSS feed contains article metadata including title, summary, source, URL, etc. Just click on one of those little RSS buttons you find scattered around the web and you'll see what I mean. Or check out my little news page (http://blab-n-lab.home.comcast.net/news.html) for representative content.

[tonyh]

Is there some good online tutorials to learn how to create these (and others) server side tools?

I don't think I'd be utilizing these anytime soon, as I still have to learn how to use mySql for databases (I have completed a course using Oracle, but just barely as neither the instructor or myself could dtermine how to delete tables).

But, it would be good to know for later this fall.

[spufi]

Originally posted by tonyh
What's RSS? And why does it seem so huge now? It's like everywhere I go, even some of my favourite site for years, are now offering RSS optional links.

Other than being a "news feeder", what is it? Why is it gaining popularity?

Same questions about "blogs". What makes these weblogs any different than a standard news update or guest book?

Are these similar to "accessibility issues" where they are becoming a "must" for modern pages?

Here's a copy of a post I made on the subject of feeds and feed readers. It's gotten to the point to where if a blog/site isn't syndicated, then I have a REALLY hard time keeping up with it.

"Here's the basics. If you check out, let's say, 20 different blogs. Do you...

A. Go to each one of them daily to see only maybe five of them were updated and thus you wasted the time it takes to go through 20 blogs when you only need to hit five.

B. Use a feed reader to tell which of the 20 blogs you check out are updated. You see five of the twenty are, and then you get a data only version of what was added since the last time you checked in.

I was clueless about it at first, but now that I've gotten into it, it's became my new crack(in a good way). I've more then doubled the number of sites I check out and I'll hit the 100 mark at some point. I'm around 50 now. Also note that more than blogs are doing this. Any kind of news site will be doing this at some point if they aren't already."

I personally use Bloglines as my feed reader and I'm pretty much subscribed to all of the big name web design blogs that I know of.