Hands on - Web development - Syndication really is simple. RSS 2 offers so much more than podcasting, so why not roll out your own news feed?(Column)

Publication: Personal Computer World

Publication Date: 01-NOV-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 VNU Business Media Europe

In last month's Sound column, Niall Magennis looked at podcasting. What's that got to do with web development? Well, although there are services designed to make it easier to get up and running with a podcast, the underlying technology is something we've looked at before in this column (May 2004), that is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.

The version we looked at was RSS 0.91, which was probably the most widely supported - and is also the easiest to code by hand.

Unfortunately, RSS 0.91 is fairly basic. It's fine for syndicating news from your website, as long as you don't want anything other than straightforward text. It also lacks some useful attributes, such as information about when something was published.

Podcasts typically use RSS 2, which adds support for plenty of extra attributes, including enclosures, which are what's used for podcasting. We'll look in more detail at how they're handled here.

You could use enclosures, for example, to distribute software updates, or any other file that needs distributing regularly, such as a price list, updated contact information or staff rotas.

A brief recap

Let's quickly recap and look at 0.91. A simple description for a feed might look a little like figure 1.

Most of the elements are necessary, while some are optional - for example, the language doesn't have to be specified, and an item can contain...

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