> The biggest problem I had was they blended RSS and blog instructions
> together and it was REALLY confusing to me.
I also find it troubling that blogs and feeds tend to be treated as
necessarily related (or even the same thing!) when really there is no
requirement for a blog to have a feed or for a feed to have a blog.
This is why I think people tend to miss some useful applications for
RSS, because they're thinking too much in the box -- the blog box,
that is.
On the other hand, as both blogs and feeds tend toward handling
regularly-updated content, it certainly makes sense to tie them
together when this fits the needs of the publisher.
> What would be helpful to people just starting out (just like me) is a simple
> list of commands to embed in your web pages and a simple list of commands to
> embed in your rss.xml page as well.
Simplicity would be good for everyone, but (unfortunately) that
doesn't match reality, because the tool set and problem space within
which the tools are applied is necessarily very complex. What might
be "simple" for you might also be worthless for someone else, and vice
versa.
> Do you need items like the ones below listed between your <head> </head>
> tags on each of your HTML pages?
Technically, you don't need an HTML page at all for a feed, so the
general answer to that would be "no."
> Do feeds really want permalink information?
Sort of... I think (not 100% sure) that the one thing all versions of
RSS require is that each item (entry, headline, whatever you want to
call it) point to something unique, and a "permalink" is one way of
having a unique resource to which the item will be connected (i.e.,
linked). Think of a newspaper -- you wouldn't want to follow a
headline of "Life Found On Mars" only to end up at an article about
how to avoid food poisoning while cooking meat at home. You want the
headline to go to the right story, every time, so you need a unique
way of identifying that story. How that is handled is presumably
specific to the version of RSS. My RSS 1.0 feeds, for example, do not
have permalink information by that name, but the link in each item
meets that permanent & unique need.
> What is it and why? I've seen formats like: whateversubject.htm#12345 Is
> there a rhyme and/or reason to those formats?
That's just an old-tech way of pointing to a specific part of an HTML
page, so in that case I would expect whateversubject.htm to have more
than one "story" (i.e., online resource) and for that particular link
to go directly to the 12345 "story." This is also part of the
uniqueness of the address to the resource. For example:
http://www.johnny-pixel.com/photo_video_news.php#s344
will take you to what is currently the most-recent story on that page,
about the OpenRAW survey. A few days from now, that story will be
further down the page, but that link will still take you to it, and it
will continue taking you to it until the resource is no longer online.
> This is the kind of information, if available, would help everyone trying to
> set up an RSS feed and help standardize things for everyone.
There needs to be a standard before things can be standardized. :-)
> Many of us do
> not want to spend hours each week trying to figure a lot of this stuff out.
> We have other things to do and want to offer RSS to people as an information
> option.
This is why people will use blog and/or content management (CMS) tools
that make RSS or Atom support either transparent or just a few clicks
away. If you can figure out how to integrate your content and a tool
of that nature, you won't have to do much or any thinking about
providing syndication support, it will just be there. And while it
might seem like a toss-up on spending time learning RSS or time
learning a blog or CMS tool, there are additional benefits to such
tools (such as improved management of content) that can make that time
investment much wiser than just learning RSS and having the only
benefit be RSS support.
--
Stuart Whitmore
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http://www.just-stuart.com/
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