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

If you have a FeedBurner account, you can use the new Publicize/SpringWidgets service to publish your feed in a Flash-based RSS/Atom Reader. This gives you the ability to drop an embed tag into any HTML page or as a widget in social sites like MySpace.

As an experiment I put one on markwoodman.com, and I like the results. Here’s a screenshot of a smaller version:

This example has small dimensions, but you can specify any length/width you like. (The one on markwoodman.com is much wider.) If you would like to play with the SpringWidget interface, you can use my widget as an example.

The widget skin provided through FeedBurner only gives partial text of each item, but in a widget environment, that makes sense. Clicking on an item will take you to the corresponding page, or you can click on the embedded RSS icon to take you to the FeedBurner feed. Good stuff.

So I was gazing into the eyes of my infant this morning, pondering life and what it all means. His bright blue eyes were communicating something I had never considered.

It was if he was saying, “Dear father: Isn’t there an RSS feed for those of us who are breastfeeding? Tips on getting the most out of your meal — that sort of thing?”

He’s right. There has to be something. And something there is:

Breastfeeding Daily Tip [sic] and News
http://www.babylovesyourmilk.com/breast-feeding/rss.xml

If the Chumby folks will let me have a prototype, I could to hook up a crib reader for my son in no time. In the meantime, I guess his mom will have to pass along the tips to him.

Er, no pun intended.

There are several media outlets offering RSS feeds of election results for today:

• New York Times - Election Results RSS
  
• Washington Post - Election Results RSS
• CBS News - Top Stories in Politics RSS
  
• Fox News - Top Stories in Politics RSS
  

U.S. citizens are voting today in the mid-term elections. (Don’t forget to vote.) If the current furor over elections is any indication, the 2008 Presidential elections should be quite a show.
If you’ve ever wanted to run for a political office but just don’t have the time, here’s a great way to prove to your friends constituents you would make a great President of the United States:

eLECTIONS

eELECTIONS is a one- or two-player Flash game in 3D board game format that looks and feels like the Game of Life. But… with less kids, and more skeletons in your closet.

Sponsored in part by the History Channel, it also offers quite a bit of educational material about how the presidential election process works.

Click the image for a full-size screenshot:

Good luck with those skeletons.