Looking for stuff on RSS etc.

flogen

I've blogged before, and have started up my new blog now, but I don't have a clue about RSS and other similar things, can anyone give me a quick run down?

For example, if I try to submit my blog to Planetoftheblogs, it asks for a referal address... what is this, and how do I find it? (I use blogger by the way)

thanks

steveland?

An RSS feed for a blog is an export of the most recent entries to your blog that can be aggregated onto a page such as POTB...

An RSS page looks something like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
- <!--  generator="wordpress/1.5" 
  --> 
- <rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
- <channel>
  <title>YOUR BLOG TITLE</title> 
  <link>http://yoursite.com/blog/</link> 
  <description>YOUR BLOG DESCRIPTION</description> 
  <pubDate>Tue, 24 May 2005 22:47:27 +0000</pubDate> 
  <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5</generator> 
  <language>en</language> 
- <item>
  <title>YOUR ENTRY TITLE</title> 
  <link>http://yoursite.com/blog/?p=72</link> 
  <comments>http://yoursite.com/blog/?p=72#comments</comments> 
  <pubDate>Tue, 24 May 2005 23:24:58 +0000</pubDate> 
  <dc:creator>steve</dc:creator> 
  <category>CATEGORY POSTED TO</category> 
  <guid>http://yoursite.com/blog/?p=72</guid> 
- <description>
- <![CDATA[ 
A DESCRIPTION OF THE ENTRY (SUMMARY) 

  ]]> 
  </description>
  <wfw:commentRSS>http://yoursite.com/blog/wp-commentsrss2.php?p=72</wfw:commentRSS> 
  </item>
 </channel>
</rss>

This is then read by POTB or wherever and depending on the aggregator is parsed to a nice readable page...

The refferer address is the address of your blog basically because your blog is going to have, for example, this in the header field to tell browsers where the feed for the page is:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://yoursite.com/blog/wp-rss2.php" />

This means the aggregator reads the address and adds it to the database (in POTB case it's a database... in other cases it'll be done using a cgi script or some other method)

Hope this helps

BTW, I think Blogger uses an Atom (XML) feed, not an rss feed so I'm not sure if POTB likes them...

flogen

That's the ticket, I think POTB is ok with Atom, will try anyway.

Made a bit of a boo-boo and submitted the wrong chunk of text, so apologies to POTB if I cause even 2 seconds of confusion!

I submitted this... I guess it's right from your example:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Blog - Adam Maguire Online" href="http://adammonline.blogspot.com/atom.xml&quot; />

Thanks again

steveland?

No man, afaik you just give the address of your blog...

for example http://flogen.blogger.com/ or whatever the URL may be

POTB will get the feed address from that

flogen

oh... well it looks like I just sent two dodgy addresses to POTB.. whoops!

Cheers for the heads-up

Cloud

No you're right, the atom address is what we need - if you're on blogger, the URL is nearly always blahblah.blogspot.com/atom.xml

flogen

Do you need all the code before it or just the actual address?

steveland?

Ah, my mistake, sorry about that.

Afaik it's just the address to your feed (the one Cloud posted there but relevant to your particular blog... it should be http://adamonline.blogspot.com/atom.xml or something similar)