26 May 2008 @ 19:26, by Mike Smith

newciv offers members with newlogs the option to publish in rss format but it seems that most do not utilize the service. Perhaps most do not know what rss is or how rss works. I have never publish an rss feed before. I use my newslog more like a webpage than a newslog but, i decided to publish a feed just to demonstrate how rss works.

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. Here is the wikipedia article on rss.

Example below,
This is the rss feed from my newciv page.

Above I utilized the service provided by www.feed2js.org
I shopped around a little and feed2js is the only rss to html service that I could find that does not advertise on my page. Again ... So what is "Feed to JavaScript"? An RSS Feed is a dynamically generated summary (in XML format) of information or news published on other web sites. Example: newciv.org offers each user their own rss feed, so when the published content on my newciv.org newlog changes, the rss also changes and this web page will be automatically updated too.

I have my feed configured to display only the 3 most recent posts but i could have set to display them all. Also I used the style wizard that is available at feed2js to create my css file. If you have several blogs or websites, like myspace etc.. And want your newciv newlog to be displayed, rss is the elegant way to do it.

look for this badge on your newslog front page

Syndication:
 

The rss badge above has two links, the first one takes you to the rss file and the second one validates the rss. Why did Ming put the validate button there? Hum I wonder... Perhaps.. That is there so we can check our post to see how other servers are going to interpret our feeds. Example; if you try to validate my feed you might find that the ShakuMatic post does not validate, that is because I placed invalid html in the beginning of my post.

feed2js is open source; it was created back in 2003 at Maricopa Community College. There are several servers that mirror the script so i don’t expect the service to disappear anytime soon, unlike the similar services that promote ads.

another example: