I just added a small feature to our RSS to JS demo, the site that demonstrates a bone-simple (even humans can do this with their bare hands) way to take a known RSS feed and have it displayed inside any web page.

This new feature is a simple web form that allows you to enter the URL for any RSS feed, select the various options our demo script provides, and voila! magic- it can do a preview version of the output and… (but wait, if you order before midnight tonight, you get a bonus feature!) it will spit out the snippet of JavaScript you need to paste into your web page.

Just days before packing his bags to leave for the MERLOT 2003 Conference, our humanities learning object Blogger “Boris” gets rather clever. He has found out how to get RSS feeds from Amazon.com on his favorite American literature movement, see object human: Amazon.com Feeds for Transcendentalism

What Boris has found is rather interesting, and completely due to the work of Raymond Yee and his WebNet Talk on RSS.

In a nutshell, Amazon publishes a custom XML for their searches and main categories, and their a transformation of XLST applied to that result, we can get plain, old, simple RSS, that plugs and plays in Boris’s weblog and his desktop aggregator.

We would not be surprised if he is sticking inside his Blackboard page as we write.

Stephen Downes outlines How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer, essentially a 9 step process for (ugh) writing RSS Feeds by hand.

An RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed is an XML file used to describe the contents of your website. As your website content changes, your RSS feed changes. Other computer systems, known as ‘aggregators’ or ‘harvesters’, read your RSS feed every once in a while. If you have provided new information, the aggregator takes that information and sends it to readers around the world. Thus information about your site’s contents is ‘syndicated’, that is, rebroadcast to a much larger audience.

An excellent one paragraph summary of what RSS is, indeed, but I would hardly recommend wiriting XML in a text editor unless it is for the command line groupie club. XML code is really best for machines to digest, not humans (or canines).

Stephen’s point might be that RSS is simple enough, and maybe one beer’s worth of effort is not much to ask for.

By way of Dave Winer (by way of NetNewsWire on my desktop) come these nifty graphic badge icons from Bryan Bell. Get yours today in delicious pink, blue, green, as PNG or GIF files, nicely provided to match your site.

Yummy candy. Show your love.

Fortunately, they are NOT imprinted with “I love RSS 0.91” or “I love RSS 1.0” etc. Just plain old “RSS”. Simple enough.

Give me a free hour and there goes another new RSS Feed. Since 1996, we have been accumulating some 4000 interesting web sites in our web’s eye view bag of urls.

Essentially the format for the content is a site title, URL, and description (does that sound like RSS or what?)

The site has an entire back end admin system where any visitor can submit a site via our drop it in the bag form. New items go into a temp holding area, until we can review them. The added feature now posts approved sites to the new Bag of URLs RSS feed.

Another gem of a resource that has a hook or two into the RSS game, is the free Google Alert service.

Even if you have no clue or interest in RSS, Google Alert is an extremely useful tool to keep you in tune into web resources that cover areas that interest you.

<tiphat>Found a link to this via some long last path to an entry at IDBlog.</tiphat>