1. IWMW Parallel Session Bath - September 2000 Andy Powell, UKOLN a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk Automated News Feeds UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives & Libraries, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC’s Electronic Libraries Programme and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.

2. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 2 Outline... news - who’s got it? who wants it? news - on and off campus about RSS a quick tour of RSS-based news services creating a first RSS channel tools: creating and managing RSS tools: using RSS using RSS for other content summing up

3. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 3 Exercise 1 - internal news 10 minutes - groups of 5 introduce yourselves discuss…within your institution: who has news to distribute (list the top 10) how do they do this (email, Web, paper, phone, …, automated/manual process?) who is the target audience who owns the info who publishes it who cleans up!

4. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 4 Exercise 2 - external news 10 minutes - in different groups of 5 introduce yourselves discuss… at your institution: what external news feeds would be useful to you (list 5 or 6) do you have any news feeds currently - how? what organisations/services could you feed news to (list 5 or 6) do you feed any sites currently - how?

5. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 5 What is RSS? Rich Site Summary (or RDF Site Summary) an XML application a standard (de facto at least) delivers news information on the Web... …hmmm, delivers information about news items on the Web (metadata) an m2m (machine to machine) application a portal content language originally developed by Netscape for My Netscape Network (Netscape’s portal)

6. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 6 What is RSS? (2) the most successful XML application currently(?) used by thousands(?) of ‘news’ sites simple to create - tools not required(?)...simple to create tools! an RSS file contains enough information to describe the RSS channel (name, logo, …) the news items in that channel (title, abstract,...) the RSS file is the channel

7. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 7 RSS syndication RSS enables exchange of structured information RSS files/channels ‘pulled’ on regular basis using HTTP frequency of collection set by the channel can aggregate multiple RSS channels merge by channel or in some other way reformat into HTML or WML or... …or re-present new merged RSS feed

8. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 8 RSS syndication (2) HTML news items HTML news items News Service

9. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 9 RSS syndication (2) HTML news items RSS HTML news items News Service

10. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 10 RSS syndication (2) HTML news items RSS Syndication service HTML, WML, RSS,... HTML news items News Service

11. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 11 Exercise 3 - a quick tour 10 minutes - on your own or in pairs Use a Web browser to answer the questions on the exercise sheet take a quick look at some example sites

12. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 12 Publishing a channel Overview/recap… 1) design channel 2) create RSS file 3) put it on your Web site (file extension should be.rss,.xml or.rdf - file should be served as text/xml) 4) validate it 5) announce it

13. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 13 Exercise 4 - creating RSS 15 minutes - on your own or in pairs 1) find 2 or 3 news items at your site 2) use notepad on your PC to create an RSS channel for your site containing 2 or 3 news items - use filename on your sheet 3) FTP it to ftp.ukoln.ac.uk - username ‘exxconf’ 4) validate it

14. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 14 Tools - creating RSS use a text editor :-( or any XML editor… …but better to aim at managing news items and RSS channel as a whole deliver news items from within general Content Management System (CMS) create RSS channel dynamically based on CMS comments! is anyone doing this already?

15. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 15 Tools - using RSS off the shelf support for RSS in products beginning to happen, e.g. Zope support for creating and integrating RSS Coldfusion(?) roll your own, Perl ASP Java comments? anyone doing this?

16. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 16 Exercise 5 - only news? 10 minutes - groups of 5 discuss… what other kinds of information could be shared using RSS? E.g. anything where content changes regularly... notice boards diaries use browser to find out about Web Logs

17. IWMW, Bath - Sept 2000 17 Summing up... there appears to be a requirement internally and externally RSS seems to meet the need? how do we get there? CMS may give us RSS for free......or, in-house development identify external news content work with external targets like HERO