Scott at EdTechPost recently blogged about a desire for an RSS feed from the Low Threshold Applications site, a collection of how-tos for teachers, designed to be powerful tasks they can do with a minimum of fuss.

The LTA site is one of those ideal for RSS-ifying: there is a regular format of content, updated over time and can be farther reaching if there were some quick ways to scan the content.

Scott took a cut at doing the “myrss” approach, a site that takes any web URL and tries to turn it into RSS. This is a shotgun approach, beacuse it more or less grabs the links it can, lacks description fields, and often gets links that are not really the content you want in a feed. Ugh.

Anyhow, I just wrote the LTA folks a quick guide for them to create and edit an RSS feed using an online tool. They should have it on their site soon, but I did a test version them as a starting point.

No one should ever, ever, be writing RSS by hand! The XML format is very picky (for good reasons), but WebReference does have a spiffy online tool to make it easy to edit your own RSS files, and modify them once you have them online.

The more you click around the web, the more you see information rich sites that could do a little bit more good by adding RSS feeds to their content. It’s even worse when you scan the URLs and sense that the content is idling away in a database. Like Clara Peller’s inquiry for beef, we are wondering, “Where’s the Feed?”

Both myself and D’Arcy Norman implemented it into our learning object collection sites in a matter of a few hours. Here is just a scoop of sites that should be adding the little orange link box..

Judging from the content structure and top links. I think these are all from the same folks, the Arts & Letters Daily, Business Daily Review, SciTech Daily – all of these sites feature RSS like headinlines on the fron page- a blurb a link that lead to a full story. Where’s the feed?

a blog/wiki paper for the July 11, 2003 LOVCOP teleconference

Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice

http://www.educause.edu/vcop/learningobjects/

Alan Levine, Maricopa Community Colleges

D’Arcy Norman, University of Calgary

Casting aside stuffy academic papers and endless PowerPoint bullets, we will present our ideas on RSS and learning objects via a collection of connected blog entries assembled in a wiki. Use the medium to communicate about the medium.

Abstract:

Customized collections of learning objects from multiple repositories are achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access to a wider range of objects than a single source. This provides discipline-specific windows into collections, contextual wrappers via blogging tools, and a system for connecting objects and implementations via TrackBack.

Visit TheFuss wiki for the relevant sources covered in the talk (and then some) plus our own blog entries for what has been a loosely coordinated and quickly moving idea since February 2003. [see a static snapshot of TheFuss wiki]

Look for this presentation also at the coveted last time slot of the Aug 5-8, 2003 MERLOT conference.

“I could have had class. I could have been a contender. Instead of what I am, a bum”

In the July/August 2003 Technology Source, Mary Harrsch makes a claim (#623?) for RSS – The Next Killer App For Education.

As blogged by David and George, the slapping of “kller app” may be over the top, but it helps to spread the word a bit.. even if the author has completely neglected the RSS work happening right around here somewhere and up in the northern hintelands of Canada 😉

Thanks to Randy B for noticing that the Onyx RSS parser we use in the RSS to JS demo has been updated. Something about cache-ing issues and line breaks (shrug). Keep up to date. It is a full time job and a half.

Okay, this should do it for a while. D’Arcy Norman suggested adding an output option to allow insertion of item date to the list. While in the code, I also made it possible to have an option on the channel display to list the title only (as well as title and description of channel, or no channel information).

That makes four options to twiddle with.

See the latest demo for details and source code .

A quick update to the PHP script for the RSS to Javascript demo posted here May 7.

For a reminder, this is a strategy for incorporating RSS feeds into ANY web page (HTML, Blackboard, WebCT) via a reference to a single line of JavaScript code.