O’Reilly (the company, not Tim) asked me to put together a Short Cut on building RSS 2.0 feeds. The intended audience is people who would like a nice starter guide to building feeds and best practices, but don’t want to invest in a printed book just yet.

How to Build an RSS 2.0 Feed

Something unique to this piece is the stated intent to follow the RSS Advisory Board’s profile recommendations as much as possible. (AFAIK this is the first commercially-published work to do so.)

I’d like to repeat my hearty thanks to James Snell and Simon St. Laurent for their contributions.

The title page doesn’t give much of a sense what is inside, so I thought it might be helpful to give a full table of contents. The “Anatomy” chapter in particular goes through every RSS element in detail, giving examples of usage and identifying best practices where applicable.

HOW TO BUILD AN RSS 2.0 FEED
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: How an RSS Feed Works

• RSS and Other Syndicated Feed Formats
• XML: The Foundation of RSS
• The Basics of XML
• Digging Further into XML
• XML and the RSS 2.0 specification
• The RSS Advisory Board

Chapter 2: Anatomy of an RSS 2.0 Feed

• The RSS Document
• The channel Element
• [… Each subelement of channel; too many to list …]
• The item Element
• [… Each subelement of item; too many to list …]

Chapter 3: RSS Best Practices

• Cascading Style Sheets in RSS
• JavaScript in RSS
• Validating Your RSS Feed
• Browser-Friendly Feeds
• Using XSLT
• Third Party Hosting

Chapter 4: Building RSS in Code

• PHP 4
• Java 1.4 with JAXP
• Java 1.4 with ROME
• Podcasting with RSS

Chapter 5: Podcasting with RSS Modules and Extensions for RSS

• Dublin Core
• Content
• CommentAPI
• Geo
• Apple iTunes

Chapter 6: Great Ideas for Using RSS

• Blog Engines
• News
• Shopping
• Government and Public Service
• Weather Updates

Index of Terms

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 08:46 and is filed under personal, syndication, rome, java, php, rss, inkblots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.