RSS Unpacked
Have you seen the little orange XML button on the front page of this site? Were you curious enough to click on it and get some techy looking page but with strangely familiar words in it? This isn't an error, it's an RSS feed — a technique for sharing information from your Endis site.
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, although that fact doesn’t tell you much. An RSS file (or RSS feed) is a text file that usually contains details about the most recent entries on a web site. It doesn’t have any information about colours, fonts, layout, or any other graphical issues. It’s simply text in a standardised format. If you look at an RSS file for this site you can see in places some text that isn’t just gibberish, but is information about this site or about its recent entries. The file says “Here’s some information that describes a web site and here are the titles and brief descriptions of recent entries.”
But what is an RSS file for? In general it is so that other people, websites and computer programs can do stuff with the information; the standardised format of RSS files makes this easy, regardless of which web site the file has come from.
There are two main uses for an RSS file : syndication and news readers.
Syndication
Syndication is the process of one web site taking content from another. Having an RSS file provides a means of publishing a "contents list" on the source site. The syndicating site can then read this programatically to find out what's available, by checking the RSS file every few hours, the contents list is kept completely up to date. This is exactly what the News Reader module does — you can specify several RSS feeds (source files) that are fetched periodically by the News Reader for display on your site's page.
News Readers
The second use for an RSS file is so people can read entries, or parts of entries, in an RSS news reader. These are programs you run on your computer. You tell it the addresses of RSS files you are interested in and it downloads them. The program then displays the entry headlines, and maybe their content, regularly fetching the latest version of the RSS file.
People use RSS news readers if they like to read lots of weblogs or news sites because it makes the process much quicker — the person no longer has to visit each site in turn to see what is new, the latest entries are fetched automatically, and the lack of graphics makes the process much quicker. It’s more like skipping through email messages rather than viewing websites, in fact the latest email programs now include news readers as standard.
RSS on Endis
Endis uses RSS in two ways — two different directions if you like — displaying information from an RSS source (the News Reader module) and listing information in an RSS format (the orange XML button).
In other words, you can incorporate news headlines within a web page, and you can also make the content of your web site available to others by advertising your own RSS feed. This means site visitors can use your RSS feed to be alerted to new articles on your site.
Switching on the orange
The orange XML button is the conventional way of advertising your RSS feed to visitors. Those who know what it is will know what to do with it, those who don't will ignore it, and some people in between will do the research to find out what to do. The RSS feed actually has the same information as displayed by the article list module, and it is in this module that you can turn on the orange button:
In the Settings of the Article List module, tick the Display Link to XML button to turn on the button that links to the RSS feed.
If you click on the button on your site's home page — the RSS feed will contain the articles that are displayed on the front page site (across all the groups). If you are viewing a group's home page, the RSS feed will contain the currently published articles in that group. Note that only publicly available articles will be listed in the RSS feed, content restricted to site members will not appear.
RSS within Endis
Given that your Endis site can be both the source and display of RSS information, it's possible to wire up the two to create automatically updating links within your web site. In fact www.churchinsight.com uses this technique on the site front page to display the latest article from a particular group.
The Latest Additions box on the front page is actually a News Reader module, that reads the RSS feed from the Latest Additions group. It is set to only display the first item, and not to scroll, and the result is a flexible technique for cross-referencing relevant content within the same site. |
