[thelist] Multiple RSS feeds

Pringle, Ron RPringle at aurora-il.org
Tue Mar 28 13:56:33 CST 2006


Hi Ken-


Ken wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have clients who would like to offer a choice between many 
> different RSS 
> feeds (20 to 30, financial mainly) to their visitors. Since I 
> have never 
> done RSS feeds or Atom, I have 3 questions.
> 
> First, what is the best way to do this? Third party SW and/or sites? 
> Multiple pages? Link to their sites?

Assuming you're asking about writing the feeds and serving them, I would
suggest reading up on the RSS spec [0] and grabbing an existing feed [1]
as a sample to modify and play with.

Creating RSS feeds by hand is fairly easy to do, though tedious if they
will be updated often. Hopefully your client's CMS can write feeds
automagically, or you can code it yourself.

If you want the feeds to be viewable via a web browser, you will also
need to transform them using XSLT. I've only just started playing with
that portion of the equation, so you might be better off with advice
from someone else on that particular aspect.

The BBC may be a good example of a site that offers up multiple feeds.
[2]


> Second, what are the likely performance hits? Traffic? Band 
> width? Load 
> time?
> 
> Third, has anyone used "Pluck" at http://www.pluck.com/index.html ?

Sorry, can't help you with either of those questions, although the feeds
typically load blazingly fast for me, given that they are just text in
XML form.

HTH

Ron

[0] http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss

[1] http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/xml/rss.xml

[2]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm?rss=/rss/newsonline_world_ed
ition/americas/rss.xml



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