RSS Channels
These are a very easy way to implement channels that "look" like native portal channels. RSS channels optionally contain an image icon providing a link to the "host" of the RSS channel as well as links to points of interest and an optional text input field. These are all rendered from an .RSS file that defines the content of the channel. .RSS files are expressed in XML.
RSS channels provide no internal navigation mechanisms. Control over the "look and feel" is suppressed by the specification. Best use of this channel results in links to external reference points.
Additional References
Finding RSS feeds
There are many RSS depositories and search engines about
- Dave Winer's Feedlist
- Fagan Finder
- Feedster Top 100
- Moreover
- O'Reilly's Meercat
- Radio Community Server's Top 100 Most-subscribed feeds
- Scripting.com Top 100
- Simply RSS from CNET.com
- Syndic8.com Popular Feeds
Here's a tip that people might find helpful, Google is very useful if you use a "google hack" to limit the returned filetypes to known syndicated feed formats, i.e. add one of the following to the end of your search:
filetype:rss
filetype:rdf
filetype:xml
filetype:opml
Also, right in this Wiki there's a list of RSS feeds.
RSS Collections
OPML seems to be the XML format of choice for newsfeed collections. e.g.: BBC
The XML Bookmark Exchange Language (XBEL), which is the format used internally in the uPortal [CBookmarks] channel, is another standard format that could be used to store feed collections.
Creating XBEL<=>OPML XSL stylesheets would also be quite trivial.
RSS Validation
Feedvalidator is an online validator for syndicated feeds. It works with RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, and 2.0. It also validates Atom feeds.
Rome is a set of Atom/RSS Java utilities that make it easy to work in Java with most syndication formats.
Email to RSS
MailBucket.org is an email-to-RSS gateway (experimental).
About the channel
uPortal 2.4 includes an XSLT which will detect the version of and render RSS feeds. It can be used as the stylesheet for a 07 CGenericXSLT channel.
Desired features
There's an open Bugzilla about some features to be added to this XSLT.
- Allow each user to customize the maximum number of headlines they want displayed from the RSS news feed.
- Allow each user to customize how old of headlines they want displayed from the RSS news feed.
Progress on these features is blocked by lack of subscribe-time user configuration of channel parameters under aggregated layouts.
Yale's local version
Yale is using Simple layouts.
We added the code to limit the number of items displayed. Requires user to provide number at subscribe time for a new parameter to the channel called 'viewNum' which defaults to 'all'. We use it for our blog channel where the user also specifies the url. You can pick up our stylesheet. It has several other changes as well (turn off title if requested, turn off image always, allow html in rss 2).
About the portlet
RSS feeds can be rendered using portlets.
- There's a partially-completed user preferences driven RSS rendering JSR-168 portlet