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#	Simple Introduction into RSS
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RSS/RDF
-------

Rich Site Summary/Resource Description Framework technology is a
simple method of a site describing what it has, so that another
site can summarise the content, and provide links back to the
original content.

RSS was pioneered by Netscape Communications for their my.netscpae
portal, and adopted quickly by many others, notably userland.com.

XML
---

A simple XML file is produced by the site originating the articles.
This file easily obtainable by HTTP is downloaded, and parsed by the
client, allowing the client to present the site summary in a way
that suits the client. XML provides a simple human readable format
that is easy to generate and read, using typical web tools.

PRINCIPLE
---------

The module came from a simple idea, gather RSS feeds, convert them into
HTML fragments and then template them into a web page on a local web
server.

Downloading RSS files

Originally I used wget, to pull files down from their server. Other tools
to do this include cURL and any browser. I cached the RSS feeds on my web
server's disk space to reduce unnessesary donwloading.

RSS Normalisation

RSS feeds come in several incompatible formats. To make conversion to HTML
simple I opted to convert all RSS feeds to RSS version 0.91 as this is very
simple to convert to HTML via XSL-Templating.

RSS Converstion

Most online examples of RSS use the XML::RSS module to programatically convert
the feed into HTML, either directly or via using one of the many quality HTML
templating tools. This I felt was inefficient and so I opeted to use "XML Style
Sheet Language Transformation", which is industry standard and does not require
programming. There are several XSL-T engines available: Saxon, Xalan, MSXML, and
Soblotron, however the fastest and easist one for Perl is Matt Sergeant's LibXSLT.

Script to Module

After developing the scirpt to do this I realised that much of the code could be
converted into a module and distributed to the world. After a popular post to
Perlmonks, I have moved the module upto APLHA state, and it is currently in
the process of moving up to CPAN.

RESOURCES
---------

Userland.com the home of key RSS developments:  http://backend.userland.com/rss092
SOAP CLient RSS->HTML online tool:  http://soapclient.com/rss/rss.html
Netscape Communications:  http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-spec-0.91.html
W3C Standards body:  http://www.w3.org/RDF/
Blogspace RSS FAQ:  http://blogspace.com/rss/
RSS Versions:  http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/1/8.html

RSS FEEDS
---------

http://www.itn.co.uk/itn.rdf
http://freshmeat.net/backend/fm.rdf
http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf
http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/?_fl=rss10
http://www.theregister.co.uk/tonys/slashdot.rdf
http://rss.blogspace.com/bbcNews/world?
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/infofeed/tenalerts.xml

