[XML-SIG] RSS and stuff

[Lars Marius Garshol]

I sat down yesterday and had a look at RSS, a format for news
headlines which is used by Slashdot, mozilla.org and Scripting News,
among others. It was very simple (a bit too simple, in fact), so I sat
down and made a simple RSS library and client in Python. This client
produces a web page when it is run. (I run it from cron.)

This is the result:

<URL: http://birk105.studby.uio.no/tmp/rss-summary.html>


The client is available at:

<URL: http://birk105.studby.uio.no/tmp/rsslib.zip>
(if it becomes popular and I extend it I'll probably make a home page
for it)


The 'specification' and lists of providers can be found at:

(warning: the RSS guide is not very accurate technically)
<URL: http://my.netscape.com/publish/help/quickstart.html>
<URL: http://my.userland.com/xml/serviceList.xml>
<URL: http://www.xmltree.com/container/contents.cfm/ContainerID/26>
(note that python.org provides an RSS summary)


After that it took me 15 minutes to make my free XML tools list
provide its updates list in RSS format and register it with the
Userland registry:

<URL: http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~larsga/linker/xmltools/tools-rss.rdf>
<URL: http://my.userland.com/viewChannel$504>


Finally, for those who may be interested, there is a Visual Basic tool
that can show RSS summaries.

<URL: http://www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer/>

--Lars M.