jared
11-01-2005, 04:08 PM
Computers and the Internet have always been filled with those lovely three letter acronyms (TLA’s). They’re unavoidable and some of them might actually be pretty cool. One you may have been hearing about or seeing is RSS. You know, those little orange icons labeled “RSS.” RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication which doesn’t say much except for it’s supposed to be easy. Don’t worry; it is!
RSS really isn’t something new at all. It’s just specially formatted XML. Again, I know the TLA’s are overwhelming. All you need to understand is that XML is a standard for writing documents. It’s just a bunch of rules for making a file an XML file. Think of it like writing a formal letter. You have to include a greeting, a body, and a salutation. I’ll leave the writing to English teachers.
Now that you know what RSS is, I’m sure you’re itching to learn about what it can do. Essentially RSS doesn’t do anything on its own. Like I said already, it’s just a specially formatted document. Where the power comes in is the apps that use it.
RSS readers are one way to use those feeds. An RSS reader is just a small program that you would install on your computer that looks at the RSS file and turns it into readable information. You can even find web based RSS readers. Yahoo (http://my.yahoo.com/) and Google (http://www.google.com/ig) both offer them. On our site if you opened our news feed in an RSS reader you’d see the title of the story, who posted it, and the contents of the story. Now that might not sound all that great being that you could stroll over to our website any time you wanted and read the news. The cool thing about RSS feeds is that they automatically contain the most up to date information. They’re self updating. Again using the news story example: Let’s say someone posts a news story. As soon that story is posted, the RSS feed updates and any readers latched on to that feed will see the new story. The great part is that a lot of sites offer feeds for you to use. You may never have to visit a website again.
For those of us who are web designers, RSS becomes a powerful tool for using information on our own site as well as from others. One instance of this is our Tour Dates section. Trustkillshows.com (http://www.trustkillshows.com) provides us with an RSS feed which we then turn into HTML and is displayed on the front page. This is done without any intervention at all. The code was written and as long as the feed doesn’t change, then it will go on doing its job forever.
Another developer tip is to use RSS to increase your page ranking in Google (http://www.google.com) . The idea is that since Google gives preference to “fresh” pages, adding in content from an RSS feed is a great way to keep your page fresh and therefore more attractive to Google’s page ranking algorithm.
Even though RSS is a great technology, it can’t do everything. For instance, you can’t post comments to our news stories through an RSS reader. Personally, I’ve also found the readers give you the information in a very plain black and white format. Sometimes it’s nice to see color. That an all those hardworking designers never get to show off any of their work if you only get the RSS feed.
Now that you know RSS a little better, let me show you how to use Decoy’s feeds specifically. We are built on top of a vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com) message board system. That’s what allows us to have discussion on just about every item on Decoy. The cool thing is vBulletin has some very configurable feeds. You’ve probably seen the RSS and XML icons below our news section before and if you’re using an RSS enabled browser like Firefox you should be getting those feeds showing up in your browser.
The first thing you need to know about our feeds is that they all go through our external.php file linked at http://www.decoymusic.com/vb/external.php. So any feed is going to start with that URL. After that URL are a bunch of options which tell external.php what to give back. This is similar to every other URL that uses GET variables. Don’t worry about what that is, just know that it’s variables to can use to change how the page behaves. URL’s with GET variables always start with a ?. So now our link would look like this:
http://www.decoymusic.com/vb/external.php?
The first and probably most important option is the type. What type of RSS feed do you want. I didn’t really explain earlier what the different between RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, and XML are. Really there isn’t much of a difference except in what information is given. To tell the truth, I don’t even know exactly what those differences are. If you’re unsure RSS 2.0 is probably the best option. Let’s say you want to get our RSS 2.0 feed. The URL would look like this:
http://www.decoymusic.com/vb/external.php?type=rss2
The other two options available are xml and rss. Like I said already, if you’re not sure try RSS 2.0 as it’s one of the more commonly support formats.
The other thing to know about the feeds is you can take from whatever forum you want. Just want news? Or maybe you just want to see what’s going on in the general discussion too. Easy to do with the forumids option. The first thing to know is each option needs some way to separate it from the rest. You do that with the & symbol. Now our URL looks like this:
http://www.decoymusic.com/vb/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=7
You can specify multiple forums by separating numbers with commas. So a link to our General Discussion and News forums would look like:
http://www.decoymusic.com/vb/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=7,2
You can combine them any way you want. You’re probably also wondering where those numbers come from. They aren’t readily visible on the forums, but if you look at the link for each of the sections, you’ll see they have a number associated with them. News is 7, General Discussion is 2, Reviews is 8, and so on.
Ready to start using RSS feeds yet? Firefox has some cool features that use RSS integrated right in, they call them live bookmarks. Here’s a little tutorial on live bookmarks in Firefox. The first thing you’ll obviously need is a copy of Firefox. You can find it at http://www.mozilla.org/ Versions are available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The installation varies depending on which operating system you’re running, so I’ll leave that task up to you. Once you get it installed, fire up Firefox and navigate to http://www.decoymusic.com. Take a look at the far right side of the address bar. There should be a little orange icon.
http://www.decoymusic.com/images/rssarticle/addressbarrss.png
If you click on it you’ll see our 3 feeds in there. Just click the one you want. You’ll get a live bookmark dialog box that looks like this.
http://www.decoymusic.com/images/rssarticle/rssselected.png
Pick a name, select where you want it to go and hit OK. Now check where you put the bookmark.
http://www.decoymusic.com/images/rssarticle/livebookmarkdialog.png
You’ll see it shows up like a folder with Firefox’s RSS icon. Inside it should have the latest 15 new items. If you click on one of the items it works like a regular bookmark.
http://www.decoymusic.com/images/rssarticle/livebookmarkexpanded.png
You can get the same result by going to the Bookmarks menu and selecting Manage Bookmarks. Then go to File and New Live Bookmark.
http://www.decoymusic.com/images/rssarticle/managebookmarks.png
Type a name, enter the feed link into Feed Location and you can fill out a description if you’d like. Press OK and that’s it. You’ll need to use that second option if you want to use the methods I described above to create a custom feed link.
Now that you’ve read through this article, you know probably more than you ever wanted to about RSS, you can manipulate any vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com)-based site’s feed, and set up a live bookmark in Firefox. Feel free to leave your comments, questions, and problems.
RSS really isn’t something new at all. It’s just specially formatted XML. Again, I know the TLA’s are overwhelming. All you need to understand is that XML is a standard for writing documents. It’s just a bunch of rules for making a file an XML file. Think of it like writing a formal letter. You have to include a greeting, a body, and a salutation. I’ll leave the writing to English teachers.
Now that you know what RSS is, I’m sure you’re itching to learn about what it can do. Essentially RSS doesn’t do anything on its own. Like I said already, it’s just a specially formatted document. Where the power comes in is the apps that use it.
RSS readers are one way to use those feeds. An RSS reader is just a small program that you would install on your computer that looks at the RSS file and turns it into readable information. You can even find web based RSS readers. Yahoo (http://my.yahoo.com/) and Google (http://www.google.com/ig) both offer them. On our site if you opened our news feed in an RSS reader you’d see the title of the story, who posted it, and the contents of the story. Now that might not sound all that great being that you could stroll over to our website any time you wanted and read the news. The cool thing about RSS feeds is that they automatically contain the most up to date information. They’re self updating. Again using the news story example: Let’s say someone posts a news story. As soon that story is posted, the RSS feed updates and any readers latched on to that feed will see the new story. The great part is that a lot of sites offer feeds for you to use. You may never have to visit a website again.
For those of us who are web designers, RSS becomes a powerful tool for using information on our own site as well as from others. One instance of this is our Tour Dates section. Trustkillshows.com (http://www.trustkillshows.com) provides us with an RSS feed which we then turn into HTML and is displayed on the front page. This is done without any intervention at all. The code was written and as long as the feed doesn’t change, then it will go on doing its job forever.
Another developer tip is to use RSS to increase your page ranking in Google (http://www.google.com) . The idea is that since Google gives preference to “fresh” pages, adding in content from an RSS feed is a great way to keep your page fresh and therefore more attractive to Google’s page ranking algorithm.
Even though RSS is a great technology, it can’t do everything. For instance, you can’t post comments to our news stories through an RSS reader. Personally, I’ve also found the readers give you the information in a very plain black and white format. Sometimes it’s nice to see color. That an all those hardworking designers never get to show off any of their work if you only get the RSS feed.
Now that you know RSS a little better, let me show you how to use Decoy’s feeds specifically. We are built on top of a vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com) message board system. That’s what allows us to have discussion on just about every item on Decoy. The cool thing is vBulletin has some very configurable feeds. You’ve probably seen the RSS and XML icons below our news section before and if you’re using an RSS enabled browser like Firefox you should be getting those feeds showing up in your browser.
The first thing you need to know about our feeds is that they all go through our external.php file linked at http://www.decoymusic.com/vb/external.php. So any feed is going to start with that URL. After that URL are a bunch of options which tell external.php what to give back. This is similar to every other URL that uses GET variables. Don’t worry about what that is, just know that it’s variables to can use to change how the page behaves. URL’s with GET variables always start with a ?. So now our link would look like this:
http://www.decoymusic.com/vb/external.php?
The first and probably most important option is the type. What type of RSS feed do you want. I didn’t really explain earlier what the different between RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, and XML are. Really there isn’t much of a difference except in what information is given. To tell the truth, I don’t even know exactly what those differences are. If you’re unsure RSS 2.0 is probably the best option. Let’s say you want to get our RSS 2.0 feed. The URL would look like this:
http://www.decoymusic.com/vb/external.php?type=rss2
The other two options available are xml and rss. Like I said already, if you’re not sure try RSS 2.0 as it’s one of the more commonly support formats.
The other thing to know about the feeds is you can take from whatever forum you want. Just want news? Or maybe you just want to see what’s going on in the general discussion too. Easy to do with the forumids option. The first thing to know is each option needs some way to separate it from the rest. You do that with the & symbol. Now our URL looks like this:
http://www.decoymusic.com/vb/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=7
You can specify multiple forums by separating numbers with commas. So a link to our General Discussion and News forums would look like:
http://www.decoymusic.com/vb/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=7,2
You can combine them any way you want. You’re probably also wondering where those numbers come from. They aren’t readily visible on the forums, but if you look at the link for each of the sections, you’ll see they have a number associated with them. News is 7, General Discussion is 2, Reviews is 8, and so on.
Ready to start using RSS feeds yet? Firefox has some cool features that use RSS integrated right in, they call them live bookmarks. Here’s a little tutorial on live bookmarks in Firefox. The first thing you’ll obviously need is a copy of Firefox. You can find it at http://www.mozilla.org/ Versions are available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The installation varies depending on which operating system you’re running, so I’ll leave that task up to you. Once you get it installed, fire up Firefox and navigate to http://www.decoymusic.com. Take a look at the far right side of the address bar. There should be a little orange icon.
http://www.decoymusic.com/images/rssarticle/addressbarrss.png
If you click on it you’ll see our 3 feeds in there. Just click the one you want. You’ll get a live bookmark dialog box that looks like this.
http://www.decoymusic.com/images/rssarticle/rssselected.png
Pick a name, select where you want it to go and hit OK. Now check where you put the bookmark.
http://www.decoymusic.com/images/rssarticle/livebookmarkdialog.png
You’ll see it shows up like a folder with Firefox’s RSS icon. Inside it should have the latest 15 new items. If you click on one of the items it works like a regular bookmark.
http://www.decoymusic.com/images/rssarticle/livebookmarkexpanded.png
You can get the same result by going to the Bookmarks menu and selecting Manage Bookmarks. Then go to File and New Live Bookmark.
http://www.decoymusic.com/images/rssarticle/managebookmarks.png
Type a name, enter the feed link into Feed Location and you can fill out a description if you’d like. Press OK and that’s it. You’ll need to use that second option if you want to use the methods I described above to create a custom feed link.
Now that you’ve read through this article, you know probably more than you ever wanted to about RSS, you can manipulate any vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com)-based site’s feed, and set up a live bookmark in Firefox. Feel free to leave your comments, questions, and problems.