YWAM Information Technology

RSS (really simple syndication) is a file format. Here is a sample from our own site.

Quick syntax tour

The first line is the declaration basically telling us it is an RSS file.

     <rss version="2.0" xml:base="http://ywamit.com">

The remainder of this document consists of nested elements, some of which have attributes and content. I won’t go into the details, but if you look at the example, you will see things like:

     • the title of the RSS feed
     • a link to the web site
     • a description of the feed
     • the language of the feed

Then you will see each news item

     • a title of the item
     • a link to the news item
     • the contents of a news item (which is called description for some reason)
     • the date and time the item was published
     • other info like copyright

So it is pretty simple. There are heaps more things one can add and you can extend this your own elements to give more information about each news item. Podcasting is exactly this. Officially the file format is called Media RSS. Here is an example. You have a few extra elements that describe:

     • a link to the media (be is an MP3 file or a AVI file or any other media such as a PDF)
     • a title for the media
     • a summary of the media
     • other info – like the length of play for example.

How to read an RSS feed

A web site will provide its content as an RSS feed, just like our site. We are the provider, and you will notice our feed only includes the main items not the comments for each item. So we choose what we want to publish.

A subscriber will then basically navigate to that link and look at the content. If you do this in Firefox or IE you will see a text file is with all the tags. There are heaps of programs that download this and display it nicely. You can get add-ons to email programs like outlook, or stand along applications.

To provide a podcasts, you have your normal RSS feed, that just links to a media file. You save the media file separately. It is just like putting a PDF on your site like I am sure we have all done – or downloaded one at least. The difference is we also have this RSS file that points to this media file.

What happens with poscasts, is when your desktop program gets the RSS feed from the provider web site, and if it knows what to do with the Media RSS it will then download the mp3 file (or whatever media it is). Then when you next go to your computer (assuming you left it on all night), you will have a file ready to play.

Hope this makes sense and sounds simple.

Finding RSS feeds

1. To find a feed, you can go to a site – like ours and see a feed link. You get the URL from the site and add it to your RSS reader.

2. There are sites where you can search for RSS feeds, this is like a list of feeds. Currently there are about 10,000 quality blogs on the web I assume most have feeds. There are 100’s of thousands of not so quality blogs, like personal teenager journals. By quality, I mean some sort of journalistic, technical or expert skill. You basically get on these lists by the publisher telling these sites that you have a feed and they can then list it.

3. There are also sites that will go too your server and download the full RSS feed from your server. They would do this at set intervals say every hour. Then they can provide lists like latest rss news items or podcasts in the form of a portal. They can also categorise you RSS feed so people can navigate to it, or they can provide a search mechanism for your RSS content.

RSS Ping Server

You may hear this term. This is more advanced. If you as a provider have new content, you can sent a “ping”, basically a package to a RSS Ping Server saying you have new content. The Ping Server will then go to your server straight away and download the new RSS feed. This saves you having to wait until the next update scan, and also saves your bandwidth as the Ping server will only come to your site when something changes.

The RSS Ping Server then acts as any other server that downloads content and aggregates it – just like point 3 above.

Conclusion

This was a technical description. There are much simpler instructions on the web - something we would use on say our base sites. Here is an example.

I hope this helps!

Hi Bill,
it might be helpful if you could tell us where we can find the source code / package for this add-on in order to take a look at it.
I guess you already checked if the version of this add-on and the version of drupal work together?

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

What version of Drupal are we using? And what version of CRSS are we using? I've just installed Drupal 5 for testing pourposes and installed CRSS and all are working fine. No URL problem. Try instaling the latest version of CRSS . Hope it helps!