Re: very basic question

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@hotmail.com>]

--- In syndication@y..., majo@t... wrote:
> 
> I had the impression that just any html site could read and display 
rss files with the 
> help of some scripts or maybe browser plugins. From what I see, it 
seems you 
> acctually need to register, you need specialised software and a 
fair amount of 
> knowledge. I understand that some thousand people are now doing 
syndication. 
> Whats missing to make this a real mass medium? Why is Microsoft 
envolved in 
> this? Can you help me to get a birds eye view please. I am looking 
for information 
> for an article in a major political/technological magazine in 
Europe. Any information 
> in this direction would be extremely helpful. 
> 
> I've warned you ;-) Thanks again.

Manfred,

To be fair, if you're going to write an insightful article you need 
to possess a fair amount of understanding.  This isn't going to come 
to you overnight.  'Warning us' doesn't absolve you of the 
responsibility to do some homework.

That said, RSS is nothing more than an agreed upon format by which 
various users and services are making material available for others.  
There's no 'distribution' involved in RSS itself.  It's nothing more 
than a file that (usually) contains text and links to relevant web 
sites.  These files sit somewhere on a server until something calls 
upon them.

This, by itself, is a good thing.  However, it's not exactly easy for 
users to get the information typed directly into an RSS formatted 
file.  This is where various content managment systems and weblogs 
have come to the rescue.  These programs make it easy for a user to 
enter the material and have it 'automagically' exported into an RSS 
document.  

That only answers part of the question.  How do those conveniently 
formatted RSS files get turned into something human readable?  This 
is where a portal service like my.netscape USED TO perform the task.  
Fortunately, there are other services like http://www.newsisfree.com 
that do it as well.

If you don't to use a service and prefer to download the files 
yourself then you can use a newsreader program.  There are several; a 
great one is Headline Viewer from Vertex: 
http://www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer/

More are listed at: http://blogspace.com/rss/tools

These programs will download the RSS files from their sources and 
process them into human readable form.  

The power of RSS lies in being able to gather content into an easily 
distributed and processed format.

You don't need to register anywhere to use RSS.  However, some places 
that process RSS have registration mechanisms.  You're free to 
download the RSS into your own viewer with no registration anywhere.  
If you want to use one of the processing systems you may have to 
register.  Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes not, but you have the 
choice.  You can use newsisfree.com without registering but you won't 
be able to use some of the really cool features it offers.

But to answer your question about how to include them in a web site, 
you need a website that understands how to 'process' the RSS files.  
This isn't a trivial task and most webservers won't do it out of the 
box.  They need to either have this ability built in or have 
something added to them.  A Manila-based site has this ability built-
into it.  Other methods exist but I can't recall them at the moment.  
I seem to recall some JavaScript that would let you render an RSS 
file directly in the browser window. http://www.blogspace.com has a 
wealth of material on how to do this.

Hopefully this commentary answers your questions.

-Bill Kearney