- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (31 Mar 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0596003838
- ISBN-13: 978-0596003838
- Product Dimensions: 23.7 x 18 x 1.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,342,110 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
RSS is sprouting all over the Web, connecting weblogs and providing news feeds. Originally developed by Netscape in 1999, RSS (which can stand for RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication) is an XML-based format that allows web developers to describe and syndicate web site content. Using RSS files allows developers to create a data feed that supplies headlines, links, and article summaries from a web site. Other sites can then incorporate them into their pages automatically. Although RSS is in widespread use, people struggle with its confusing and sometimes conflicting documentation and versions. Content Syndication with RSS is the first book to provide a comprehensive reference to the specifications and the tools that make syndication possible.
Content Syndication with RSS offers webloggers, developers, and the programmers who support them a thorough explanation of syndication in general and RSS in particular. Written for web developers who want to offer XML-based feeds of their content, as well as developers who want to use the content that other people are syndicating, the book explores and explains metadata interpretation, different forms of content syndication, and the increasing use of web services in this field.
This concise volume begins with an introduction to content syndication on the Internet: its purpose, limitations, and traditions, and answers the question of why would you consider "giving your content away" like this? Next, the book delves into the architecture of content syndication with an overview of the entire system, from content author to end user on another site. You'll follow the flow of data: content, referral data, publish-and-subscribe calls, with a detailed look at the protocols and standards possible at each step. Topics covered in the book include:
- Creating XML syndication feeds with RSS 0.9x and 2.0
- Beyond headlines: creating richer feeds with RSS 1.0 and RDF metadata
- Using feeds to enrich a site or find information
- Publish and subscribe: intelligent updating
- News aggregators, such as Meerkat, Syndic8, and Newsisfree, and their web services
- Alternative industry-centric standards
About the Author
Ben Hammersley is an English emigre, living in Sweden, with his wife, three greyhounds, a few hundred deer, and a two-way satellite connection. For a day job, he writes for the British national press, appearing in The Times, The Guardian, and The Observer, but in his free time, he blogs excessively at www.benhammersley.com and runs the Lazyweb.org ideas site. As a member of the RSS 1.0 Working Group, he survived the Great Fork Summer, and as a journalist he has been accosted by the secret police of two countries. To this day, he doesn't know which was worse.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
RSS is taking over the world - more and more sites are sporting the little orange 'XML' buttons which provide a simple way to keeping up with changes in your aggregator of choice. This book aims to explain the what and the how of RSS to bloggers, developers and programmers, particularly those who want to create their own feeds.
Although this is a thin book by O'Reilly and technical book standards, it's not light on content. Ben Hammersley rattles through the convoluted history of content syndication and RSS in particular, then delves into the standards and how they are used. There's also good coverage of how to create your own feeds, how to integrate other feeds into your site and other aspects of how the standards are used in practice.
This isn't a book for raw beginners - if you've never heard of XML before, you'll probably need to get up to speed with the basics at least - but it covers what you need to know about the subject in a clear but not overly-long way. It's also written in a pretty conversational style which lightens up what could have been a pretty dull text. Ben Hammersley writes for a wide variety of publications on a wide variety of more-and-less geeky subjects, so he's well-able to explain technical stuff to an unfamilar audience.
Two minor criticisms - all the code examples are in Perl, which although useful is somewhat restrictive; and the references to specific applications and services are likely to be quickly out
of date.
There are other books out there that cover similar ground along with other subjects, but this is a good introduction to RSS and content syndication specifically. It might not be something you'll refer to on a daily basis, but it's worth the purchase price nevertheless.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The first thing that strikes you about this book is how thin it is. At 208 pages including the index, it has to be one of the shortest books that O'Reilly produce. However, once you start reading the book it is well laid out and easy to read as avid O'Reilly readers come to expect. The examples are clear and all current RSS standards are covered and the topic is covered in well with no bias on the political situation which has surrounded RSS since its earliest days.
There is one major gripe that I do have about this book; the examples are solely in Perl and whilst this is a method that many people will use, it would have been nice to see examples in other languages such as Python and PHP.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
A Little Misleading
26 Sep 2004
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
For the most part, industry standard RSS is a very short list of simple XML elements. Standard RSS Readers only look for those standardized tags to create the display. You can verify that by opening almost any public RSS XML document and just looking at it. RSS is simple enough that you could probably pick it up by just looking at a well formed sample file and reading the short syntax document provided for free by the creators (UserLand Software for RSS 2.0 or the RSS-DEV Working Group for RSS 1.0 - FeedValidator.org has links to the documentation). After reading this title, I am a little confused as to whom target audience is supposed to be.
The first issue I had with the book is the coverage of versions. The author has chosen to write not only about the two current versions (1.0 and 2.0 - two companies, two separate tracks of standardized tags), but the preceding versions for each. I don't buy a Word 2003 book to learn about Word 6. The layout could serve as a reference guide for the tags when you're done, but again, the vendor provided syntax guides are easier to reference. Next, the author makes some assumptions that aren't publicized; you should be really (really) familiar with XML to understand many chapters in the book, and you should also develop in Perl (as there are numerous, lengthy Perl scripts used as demos). I've created many RSS Feeds for both company Intranets as well as Internet sites, and given the simplicity of RSS, I can tell you that you don't need either to create a feed on your own.
The back cover claims the book is a "step-by-step guide to implementation", but it really isn't. The author has written a very nice book on the general history and specs of standardized RSS, but then fills the remaining pages with a general syntax overview of other commonly used RSS XML namespaces (not really demo-ing them), ideas for extending RSS with your own XML namespaces (which is great, but really just produces a customized XML document that industry standard RSS reader's won't know what to do with) , and then transforming other site's RSS Feeds into your own conglomerated XHTML page with various Perl conversion scripts, SOAP tie-ins, etc.
For the percentage of people that already know RSS and are looking to really go into advanced manipulations - this is a great title and I recommend it. For everyone else who just want to quickly learn the very simple syntax, this is a misleading title and I would recommend saving your money and reading the vendor's free syntax guides, or talking a quick on-line course. You'll find RSS easy enough without this book.
The first issue I had with the book is the coverage of versions. The author has chosen to write not only about the two current versions (1.0 and 2.0 - two companies, two separate tracks of standardized tags), but the preceding versions for each. I don't buy a Word 2003 book to learn about Word 6. The layout could serve as a reference guide for the tags when you're done, but again, the vendor provided syntax guides are easier to reference. Next, the author makes some assumptions that aren't publicized; you should be really (really) familiar with XML to understand many chapters in the book, and you should also develop in Perl (as there are numerous, lengthy Perl scripts used as demos). I've created many RSS Feeds for both company Intranets as well as Internet sites, and given the simplicity of RSS, I can tell you that you don't need either to create a feed on your own.
The back cover claims the book is a "step-by-step guide to implementation", but it really isn't. The author has written a very nice book on the general history and specs of standardized RSS, but then fills the remaining pages with a general syntax overview of other commonly used RSS XML namespaces (not really demo-ing them), ideas for extending RSS with your own XML namespaces (which is great, but really just produces a customized XML document that industry standard RSS reader's won't know what to do with) , and then transforming other site's RSS Feeds into your own conglomerated XHTML page with various Perl conversion scripts, SOAP tie-ins, etc.
For the percentage of people that already know RSS and are looking to really go into advanced manipulations - this is a great title and I recommend it. For everyone else who just want to quickly learn the very simple syntax, this is a misleading title and I would recommend saving your money and reading the vendor's free syntax guides, or talking a quick on-line course. You'll find RSS easy enough without this book.
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful
didn't get me started at all!
3 May 2004
Format:Paperback
I was expecting this book to show me somewhere in the first hundred pages an example of how to create an RSS feed. Instead I got wayyyy too much history, and I couldn't find a "hello, world" example.
I grant that the history is important, and this book will probably fit in well to the cadre of books that emerge on RSS over the next year or two. However, this year, this isn't the book I needed.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Best PRINTED resource about the topic available today
26 Mar 2004
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I must underscore the reason why I capitalized the word "PRINTED" in the title of this review. This is indeed the best book about the topic of RSS (RDF Site Summary), which has become increasingly more important since blogs jumped out of tech obscurity to become a mainstream form of web-enabled information dissemination. However, nowadays the topic is too dynamic (there's too much happening these days in the field of RSS) to make Hammersley's book a comprehensive and current enough resource for all matters and purposes.
As a general introductory reading, it's the best book out there. But once you get your feet deep enough in the RSS waters, you need to go online and search for the current APIs, Web Services, News Aggregators and RSS/Blog Directories, which is the area where the book will fall behind the fast growth of this area. Overall, very well structured, even with an appendix on the XML you need to know, in order to be able to deal with RSS.
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