From: Debra Goldentyer (goldenty@haas.berkeley.edu)
Date: Mon May 19 2003 - 10:01:00 PDT
June 17 Webnet: The Use of RSS and other XML Formats for Content Distribution
Presenters:
Kalle Nemvalts, who is the Publication Manager for Information Systems and
Technology, will demonstrate how he re-engineered campus IT news to use RSS
channels in a system written in Java and using free or open-source
components. Full details below.
Scot Hacker, who is the webmaster at the Graduate School of Journalism,
will demonstrate how he's used Movable Type to manage student-driven web
sites complete with syntactically valid RSS feeds. Full details below.
Raymond Yee, who is the Technology Architect for the Interactive University
Project, will talk about using other key XML formats in the educational,
library, and technology worlds that can be used to allow content to be
reused and recontextualized. Full details below.
WHEN: Tuesday, June 17, 12 - 1:30 p.m.
(Please note that this meeting will last a full one and one half hours.)
WHERE: 3110 Etcheverry
WHO'S INVITED: Anyone on the UCB campus interested in XML content distribution.
Full presentation descriptions:
Kalle Nemvalts on an RSS-based solution for distributing campus IT news
At UC Berkeley's Information Systems and Technology, we have been
re-engineering campus IT news to use RSS channels. RSS is a simple XML
document format that was introduced in 1999 to deliver lightweight news
items (title, link, description) to portals. More recently RSS has been
used for weblogging applications.
We are using it to automate news pages, headline lists, service status
information pages, resource lists, and so on. In managing online news, the
hard part is not generating the full text articles (which we are doing, as
before, as simple HTML pages), but managing all the various links and
references to the articles. This is the part that we are able to automate
with RSS. This is not full-blown content management, but does solve a
significant part of the problem.
RSS provides a mechanism for syndication (making content available for
inclusion in other web pages) and aggregation (pulling content from
multiple sources into a single web page or portal). One such application of
RSS is to pull service status information from a variety of service
providers into a central service status page.
I have developed an in-house administrative web application to manage RSS
channels. The application is written in Java and uses free or open-source
components. It runs inside Apache Tomcat and uses MySQL for its database of
news channels and news items. Application functions include (1) capture of
news items from incoming channels; (2) entry and editing of news items; (3)
posting of news items on multiple outgoing channels; (4) XML validation;
(5) publishing of news channels in RSS, HTML, text, and other formats. I
will give a brief demo of the application.
I will also demonstrate a simple Apache Ant project that does XML
validation, transformation of XML into HTML using XSLT, and loading of
remote RSS channels for inclusion into local HTML pages. Ant provides a
great environment for working with XML, XSLT, and RSS. It's Java-based, but
you don't need to work directly with Java -- you just need to make sure a
recent version of Java is installed in your environment.
Scot Hacker on using Movable Type to manage student-driven web sites
complete with syntactically valid RSS feeds
Any site offering news or information that changes frequently will benefit
from the addition of an RSS feed. Once established, other sites will be
able to link directly and automatically into your content without the
intervention of a human editor. In addition, you'll be serving the growing
ranks of surfers using RSS "aggregators" or "feed readers" -- desktop
applications that gather dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds into one compact
interface, enabling the user to scour many sites in the time it previously
took to surf a few.
Unfortunately, generating an RSS feed from the day's news is technically
tricky for those without programmer resources at their disposal.
Fortunately, the burgeoning crop of free or inexpensive weblog / content
management systems on the market generate RSS feeds automatically, with
zero effort required from site editors. In a recent survey we made of
eight common weblogging tools, not a single one lacked built-in
RSS-generation capabilities. But don't think you have to run a weblog to
take advantage of this feature - some of these tools are sophisticated
enough to generate complex web sites that barely resemble weblogs.
Raymond Yee: "RSS is only the beginning"
RSS is perhaps the most active used XML format for content
syndication. However, there is so much interesting digital content to
syndicate, aggregate and reuse that is not currently in RSS format. This
content resides in our libraries, museums, scholarly repositories,
government archives. I will talk about using other key XML formats in the
educational, library, and technology worlds that can be used to allow
content to be reused and recontextualized. I will look at the question of
how digital cultural heritage materials and scholarly works can be "ripped,
mixed, and burned" in recombinatorial, bricolage authoring.
Raymond Yee is the Technology Architect for the Interactive University
Project (http://iu.berkeley.edu/iu), whose mission is to enable UC Berkeley
to make its extraordinary resources of people and knowledge available on
the Internet. We serve learners and educators, targeting K-12 teachers,
students, their families, and local communities throughout the Bay Area and
California.
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Webnet is a voluntary organization for UCB folks to discuss World-Wide Web
related issues. For more information on webnet and its meetings, read the
Berkeleyan article at
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2002/08/21_webnet.html.
Feel free to forward this announcement.
_______________________________
Debra Goldentyer
Web Editor
University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business
510-643-3847 / goldenty@haas.berkeley.edu
http://haas.berkeley.edu/
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