Web syndication involves allowing a section of your Web site to be made available for other sites to use. One of the most notable mechanisms of Web syndication is through Web feeds. A Web feed contains structured content items (anything from news, weather or your top 10 Web sites) in a summarised form. The two main Web feed formats are RSS (which has been around for a lot longer and is more widely used) and Atom (a newer format that has just completed the IETF standardisation process.)
A number of RSS news feeds are available for the IWMW 2007 event:
These feeds can be viewed using RSS viewers such as RSSxpress.
The following policies apply to RSS feeds for the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006:
An OPML file is also available. OPML files allows groups of RSS files to be managed collectively.
The RSS and OPML files can be accessed using dedicated RSS viewers. In addition you may wish to embed the content within your own Web site.
The Grazr OPML viewer provides a simple mechanism for embedding the content. Please note, however:
If you chose to make use of the RSS and OPML files and the Grazr application you are responsible for carrying out your own risk assessment.
Experimental OPML viewers are also available:
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if you would like to embed this viewer in your own Web site, simply use the following code:
<script type="text/javascript" > initOPML="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2006/iwmw2006.opml"; grazrAPIkey = "ALPHA07"; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://grazr.com/mini/GrazrMini.js"> </script>
Further information about OPML is available.
It should be noted that, as described in Wikipedia, OPML has various shortcomings (e.g. OPML stores data in XML attributes, which violates a common XML design principle and due to the arbitrary nature of the "type" attribute and the acceptance of arbitrary attributes on "outline" elements, interoperability of OPML documents relies almost entirely on the undocumented conventions of content producers.) This OPML service should, therefore be regarded as experimental, is not guaranteed to be interoperable and the file is liable to be removed without notice.
Creating Web feeds and also tagging digital objects allows us to use our resources in may different ways. One example of this is through the use of SuprGlu which 'brings the pieces of your Web content together into one central place' by syndicating RSS feeds. The IWMW2006 SuprGlu page is pulled from del.icio.us tags and the IWMW2006 RSS feeds.
Barry Cornelius ran a parallel session entitled Making RSS work in your Institution during the workshop.
Please note that Suprglu and Graqr are remotely held services. The main aim of these services is rto provide access to resource before, during and shortly after the event. No long term access can be guaranteed. However in order to monitor the stability of such services, an occassional record will be kept of the availability of the services:
Last modified: 9th May 2008
