Content Syndication with RSS [Paperback]

Ben Hammersley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0596003838 | ISBN-13: 978-0596003838 | Edition: 1st

RSS is sprouting all over the Web, connecting weblogs and providing news feeds. Originally developed by Netscape in 1999, RSS (which can stand for RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication) is an XML-based format that allows web developers to describe and syndicate web site content. Using RSS files allows developers to create a data feed that supplies headlines, links, and article summaries from a web site. Other sites can then incorporate them into their pages automatically. Although RSS is in widespread use, people struggle with its confusing and sometimes conflicting documentation and versions. Content Syndication with RSS is the first book to provide a comprehensive reference to the specifications and the tools that make syndication possible.

Content Syndication with RSS offers webloggers, developers, and the programmers who support them a thorough explanation of syndication in general and RSS in particular. Written for web developers who want to offer XML-based feeds of their content, as well as developers who want to use the content that other people are syndicating, the book explores and explains metadata interpretation, different forms of content syndication, and the increasing use of web services in this field.

This concise volume begins with an introduction to content syndication on the Internet: its purpose, limitations, and traditions, and answers the question of why would you consider "giving your content away" like this? Next, the book delves into the architecture of content syndication with an overview of the entire system, from content author to end user on another site. You'll follow the flow of data: content, referral data, publish-and-subscribe calls, with a detailed look at the protocols and standards possible at each step. Topics covered in the book include:

• Creating XML syndication feeds with RSS 0.9x and 2.0
• Beyond headlines: creating richer feeds with RSS 1.0 and RDF metadata
• Using feeds to enrich a site or find information
• Publish and subscribe: intelligent updating
• News aggregators, such as Meerkat, Syndic8, and Newsisfree, and their web services
• Alternative industry-centric standards

If you're interested in producing your own RSS feed, this step-by-step guide to implementation is the book you'll want in hand.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ben Hammersley is an English emigre, living in Sweden, with his wife, three greyhounds, a few hundred deer, and a two-way satellite connection. For a day job, he writes for the British national press, appearing in The Times, The Guardian, and The Observer, but in his free time, he blogs excessively at www.benhammersley.com and runs the Lazyweb.org ideas site. As a member of the RSS 1.0 Working Group, he survived the Great Fork Summer, and as a journalist he has been accosted by the secret police of two countries. To this day, he doesn't know which was worse.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596003838
• ISBN-13: 978-0596003838
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,198,194 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ben Hammersley is a British writer and journalist, based in Florence, Italy. Previously writing as the first Internet reporter for The Times, he currently contributes to The Guardian.

Unlike many technology writers, Hammersley's stories often result from reporting from dangerous countries. He has worked in Iran and Afghanistan and interviewed the Burmese opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

Hammersley has been influential in the RSS community and coined the term podcasting. He built and maintains the Lazyweb, and the weblogs of The Guardian. He is attributed with the first Warchalking in the wild, on a street corner in Kensington, London in June 2002.

Hammersley also regularly contributes to congresses and conferences, such as the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and the Global Investigative Journalism Conference. He is a member of the advisory council of the Open Rights Group.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Little Misleading, September 26, 2004

By 

Jase T. Wolfe - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Content Syndication with RSS (Paperback)

For the most part, industry standard RSS is a very short list of simple XML elements. Standard RSS Readers only look for those standardized tags to create the display. You can verify that by opening almost any public RSS XML document and just looking at it. RSS is simple enough that you could probably pick it up by just looking at a well formed sample file and reading the short syntax document provided for free by the creators (UserLand Software for RSS 2.0 or the RSS-DEV Working Group for RSS 1.0 - FeedValidator.org has links to the documentation). After reading this title, I am a little confused as to whom target audience is supposed to be.

The first issue I had with the book is the coverage of versions. The author has chosen to write not only about the two current versions (1.0 and 2.0 - two companies, two separate tracks of standardized tags), but the preceding versions for each. I don't buy a Word 2003 book to learn about Word 6. The layout could serve as a reference guide for the tags when you're done, but again, the vendor provided syntax guides are easier to reference. Next, the author makes some assumptions that aren't publicized; you should be really (really) familiar with XML to understand many chapters in the book, and you should also develop in Perl (as there are numerous, lengthy Perl scripts used as demos). I've created many RSS Feeds for both company Intranets as well as Internet sites, and given the simplicity of RSS, I can tell you that you don't need either to create a feed on your own.

The back cover claims the book is a "step-by-step guide to implementation", but it really isn't. The author has written a very nice book on the general history and specs of standardized RSS, but then fills the remaining pages with a general syntax overview of other commonly used RSS XML namespaces (not really demo-ing them), ideas for extending RSS with your own XML namespaces (which is great, but really just produces a customized XML document that industry standard RSS reader's won't know what to do with) , and then transforming other site's RSS Feeds into your own conglomerated XHTML page with various Perl conversion scripts, SOAP tie-ins, etc.

For the percentage of people that already know RSS and are looking to really go into advanced manipulations - this is a great title and I recommend it. For everyone else who just want to quickly learn the very simple syntax, this is a misleading title and I would recommend saving your money and reading the vendor's free syntax guides, or talking a quick on-line course. You'll find RSS easy enough without this book.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars didn't get me started at all!, May 2, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Content Syndication with RSS (Paperback)

I was expecting this book to show me somewhere in the first hundred pages an example of how to create an RSS feed. Instead I got wayyyy too much history, and I couldn't find a "hello, world" example.

I grant that the history is important, and this book will probably fit in well to the cadre of books that emerge on RSS over the next year or two. However, this year, this isn't the book I needed.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best PRINTED resource about the topic available today, March 26, 2004

By 

Manny Hernandez "@askmanny" (Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Content Syndication with RSS (Paperback)

I must underscore the reason why I capitalized the word "PRINTED" in the title of this review. This is indeed the best book about the topic of RSS (RDF Site Summary), which has become increasingly more important since blogs jumped out of tech obscurity to become a mainstream form of web-enabled information dissemination. However, nowadays the topic is too dynamic (there's too much happening these days in the field of RSS) to make Hammersley's book a comprehensive and current enough resource for all matters and purposes.

As a general introductory reading, it's the best book out there. But once you get your feet deep enough in the RSS waters, you need to go online and search for the current APIs, Web Services, News Aggregators and RSS/Blog Directories, which is the area where the book will fall behind the fast growth of this area. Overall, very well structured, even with an appendix on the XML you need to know, in order to be able to deal with RSS.