Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007:
Next Steps for the Web Management Community
RSS Feeds and Web Syndication

About

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.)

RSS Feeds

A number of RSS news feeds are available for the IWMW 2007 event:

• News: [About] - [RSS file]
• Parallel sessions: [About] - [RSS file]
• Plenary talks: [About] - [RSS file]
• Entries to innovation competition: [About] - [RSS file]

These feeds can be viewed using RSS viewers such as RSSxpress.

Policies On RSS Feeds

The following policies apply to RSS feeds for the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007:

• We will seek to ensure that the content of the RSS feeds is accurate and appropriate.
• We will seek to ensure that the titles and descriptions are kept to a consistent length and style.
• We will endeavour to ensure that the URL of this page and of the RSS feeds for at least one year after the event.
• We will validate the RSS files when they are created or updated.
• We will make use of simple, clean RSS in order to ensure the feeds can be used in a wide range of RSS readers.

OPML File

An OPML file is also available. OPML files allows groups of RSS files to be managed collectively.

• OPML file
• 

Embedding Content In Your Own Web Site

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:

• The Grazr viewer will only work in JavaScript-enabled browsers
• The Grazr software is hosted by an external third-party service. The service may cease to work if the company changes its policies.
• We do not provide an endorsement of this particular application.

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:

• Optimal OPML viewer
• OPML Surfer viewer
• View using inline Grazr experimental viewer (see below - note Javascript-enabled browsers only).

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-2007/iwmw2007.opml";
grazrAPIkey = "ALPHA07";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://grazr.com/mini/GrazrMini.js">
</script>

About OPML

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.