Setting up RSS feeds in an organization

A few days ago, Nick Kratsas, online editor of The Pitt News -- the college newspaper of the University of Pittsburgh -- said he had come across some of my writings on RSS feeds and wanted to learn more on how to use RSS with their news site.

Writes Nick: "I am very interested in this, but have no idea where to start. We at The Pitt News are always looking for new ways to expand and improve our readers experience, and allowing RSS syndication would be a great addition."

In the past, I've set up an RSS feed for my personal weblog but not for an organization such as a newsroom, so I sent a query out to the online-news list and got some good responses. Feel free to add any additional comments below.

Nick says he'll keep us apprised of how they implement an RSS feed for the enterprise.

Eric Meyer, director of academic operations and technology and associate professor of journalism, College of Communications, University of Illinois (among other things), wrote:

The challenge is what structure the site has -- whether it's driven by some database, has a standard front-page template, whatever. If it does, you simply need to write a script to query that database or template and reformat it into XML.

Example: A site has this template:

xxx

(Carats changed to brackets in this example.)

[h1]Lead head[/h1]
[p]Summary of lead story[/p]
[a href=xxx]Link[/a]

[h2]Second head[/h1]
[p]Summary of second story[/p]
[a href=xxx]Link[/a]

xxx

Parse and translate the file in PERL or some other programming
language, or even manually do a series of find-and-replace
operations, in this case with asterisks standing as wildcards:

[h*] = [item][title]
[/h*] = [/title]
[p] = [description]
[/p] = [/description]
[a href=" = [link]
]*[/a] = [/link][category]News[/category][/item]

Replace the junk before the first [h*] with this:

[?xml version="1.0" ?]
[rss version="2.0"]
[channel]
[title]Publication name[/title]
[description]Publication description[/description]
[link]Publication base URL[/link]
[language]en-us[/language]
[pubDate]Sun, 11 Jul 2004 20:07:02 GMT[/pubDate]

and replace the junk after the last link with this:

[/channel]
[/rss]

and voila, you have a simple RSS feed.

Note the formatting of the date; it's probably the hardest part. If
you do this via script, the script can do it dynamically without need
for intervention. Just point people to the script as the source of
the feed.

The key is in making sure the site uses predictable templating or is
created from a predictably formatted data file. The RSS part is easy after that.

Aaron Schaap of Elevator Up Internet Consulting & Development (616-566-1423) pointed to this 2003 article by Danny Sullivan on SearchEngineWatch: "Making An RSS Feed."

The above article is a really well written article on how to write RSS feeds. In about 15 minutes you'll know enough to start publishing your own feeds.

Where things will get a little trickier is having this done automatically. More than likely you have a Content Management System that spits your news online everyday. Talk to whoever made that (or uses it) and see if they can't have it spit the appropriate information out.

The SearchEngineWatch article is a bit daunting for newcomers, in my judgment, so it's really more about incorporating an RSS script into the content management system so that none of this has to be done by hand.

Stephen Downes has another useful article: How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer.

Bob Stepno wrote:

A couple of weeks ago I saw Dan Bricklin demo his new program, ListGarden, an open source tool to manually create RSS for pages that don't have automatic CMS-generated feeds. The program runs in a browser window.

Has anyone tried it yet? Looks good for "breaking news" or "alerts"
feeds for readers who prefer such things in RSS rather than e-mail, or special features a CMS doesn't handle.

Docs: "It can be used for RSS feeds that are change logs, event lists, lists of physical objects, or post lists of manually authored
weblogs... The program requires no knowledge of XML or the RSS data format, and is tuned for quick additions of new items and simple editing."

ListGarden also can produce an optional companion HTML file of the feed contents.

Dan's What is RSS?page is excellent. So is his well-illustrated essay on planning and serving a feed, including writing heads & descriptions (news folks will like his "no teasing" advice to business writers).

And of course he has an RSS feed to announce updates to the program or its documentation.

Update on RSS Aggregators here and here.

Kelly Thomas offered this:

This article, from Blogs at Harvard Law, has some directories on specs and how to's. A wealth of info.