Syndicating Content with RSS and ArticleLive

By Jordie Bodlay

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (this is widely accepted, although another common term used is Rich Site Summary). It is an XML based standard for syndicating website content. It can be used for any type of frequently updated content, but for the most part it is used to syndicate news, articles and blogs.

We use RSS feeds on our site and also in our products. In ArticleLive NX, it’s used it to syndicate the 10 latest articles, news items and blog posts -- each a separate feed. There is also a feed for each category to display the 10 newest articles for that specific category. In the current release of ActiveKB there is a similar per category feed and for ActiveKB NX 2 (in Beta at the time of writing) we have added feeds for the 10 latest questions and the 10 most popular questions.

There are a few versions of RSS feeds that are popular among various sites. The most popular are RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. Our products confirm to the RSS 2.0 standard as it allows us a degree of flexibility for extra elements that the earlier standards don’t. MSDN has a great question and answer page for further information on the standards, although it can get rather technical. Mark Pilgrim on XML.com also offers an insight into the syndication standards.