Syndicate this page

The content of this News Log site is made available for syndication through a mechanism called RSS.

That means that the headlines from this site can be picked up automatically from programs that use the RSS standard. The most likely scenarios are:

1. You as an individual run a program on your desktop which picks up listings of new articles from a number of different channels that you are interested in. There are a number of different programs to choose from.

2. The owner of this News Log, or somebody else, submits it to some public News Aggregator site which picks up lists of new articles from many different sources. For example NewsIsFree or My.UserLand

3. A Webmaster of another website that maybe has similar content or aims as this News Log, can choose to pick up a listing of articles from here, and place it in a side bar on his own site. It can be done so that the listing will always be automatically up-to-date, and when visitors click on one of the links, they will be transferred to this News Log site here to see the full text.

Any of those three scenarios require either an existing program or some technical understanding. But aside from that, all you really need to know from this site is the location of the RSS/XML information. You will inform your own program about that, and that is where it will go and pick up the new information. You will find the information you need behind this image:

This is RSS channel information for syndication purposes

The actual address you're looking for is this: http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/__xml_rss/_v

The main standard that is in use here is RSS, which means Rich Site Summary, and which was originally developed by Netscape to use for news "Channels", which they supported in some of their browsers. RSS is based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) which is a generic standard for how to represent structured information, which all makes it easier for diverse systems to exchange information.

If you are technically inclined and interested you can read more about RSS here. Now, if your interest is of category #3 above, as a webmaster who wants to use content from here on your site, what follows is more information and hints on how to do that.

In order to use this information you need to already be somewhat fluent when it comes to webpage design and CGI programs. You can do this in several different platforms, but you do need to have some skill in using a scripting or programming language in connection with your website.

You can read more about using RSS here, where you'll also find some instructions on how to use it with the Perl language.

Solutions here are limited to the Perl or PHP languages, but there are many other possibilities if you're using something else. But those happen to be the most common. You can find a program here that you can integrate into your site to then be able to pick up RSS content.

If you want to use Perl, be aware that you need a couple of library modules you might not have as described in the article above and then you need a program like rss2html.pl. You would call it from a server-side include, or something similar, to include the segment of HTML it produces into your page. You give it the parameter of the RSS specification on this site, which is http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/__xml_rss/_v. You would then get a segment on your page looking something like this.

If your server has the PHP scripting language you can use a program looking like:
<?php
include("rsslib.inc.php");
getrdf("http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/__xml_rss/_v", "/tmp/.rss", 30, 10);
listrdf("/tmp/.rss", 20);
?>
which uses a simple RSS library that looks like this to produce a result that looks like this. The main thing to customize would be the location in your file system that it stores a temporary cache of entries.

Another PHP solution is php-rss downloadable from here. One example looks like this.

These various programs have more options and possibilities. These are just examples or how they might be used and configured.