Comments

What's this then?

• An RSS skin for outputing changes information into. File: view.rdf.tmpl
• A script based on changes that's essentially the same script, but has the above skin hardcoded (ick) but does not use getRenderedVersion (you get a broken RDF file otherwise) nor inserting the topic summary etc.

What's it for?

• KDE has a built in RSS news ticker with this you can pick up info on things that've changed very quickly & easily...
• Many people have sites using things like slashcode etc to pull RDF/RSS files and produce nice little headline update boxes - Twiki sites can now automatically gain the same thing.
• Fun

I've been meaning to do this for a while. but having an RSS ticker in my KDE taskbar made quite a big difference. Makes it easier to stay 1 step ahead

If this was on TWiki.org, example usage might be:

• http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/news/Codev/
• http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/news/Support/
• http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/news/Plugins/

-- TWikiGuest - 09 Aug 2001

Nice, very nice!

-- MartinCleaver - 10 Aug 2001

Very nice indeed! Looked briefly at the code, is small and simple, e.g. beautiful.

Some thoughts:

[Netscape RDF comment deleted]

• Since you provide a new news script I suggest to use a corresponding news.tmpl template instead of a skin. This is just a naming thing to bring it in line with the naming convention of TWiki.

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Aug 2001

[W3C vs. Netscape RDF comment deleted]

It's quite nice to see changes going by in my ticker on my desktop using this !

Regarding naming of scripts/templates - sounds good to me

-- TWikiGuest - 15 Aug 2001

See TWikiSyndication for an implementation of this feature that should make it into the BeijingRelease (it's in the current TWikiAlphaRelease).

RichSiteSummary has a clarification of how RDF and RSS hang together, and a great article on this area. It's worth noting that although typical RSS feeds use *.rdf files to define their RSS files, and the letters 'RDF' figure prominently in RSS files (more so than 'RSS'), such RSS files are no more 'RDF' than (say) HTML 'is XML'.

In other words, RDF is a generic language that is used to define a specific application (i.e. the RSS format in this case), rather like XML being used to define HTML. A particular RSS feed will then generate a (hopefully valid) RSS document based on the RSS spec.

'Netscape RDF' is a misnomer - Netscape never defined their own version of RDF, they just defined RSS using the standard RDF. Unfortunately this confusion has dogged the RSS world for some time.

-- RichardDonkin - 19 Feb 2002

Related topics: RichSiteSummary, SemanticWeb, ResourceDescriptionFramework, HeadlinesPlugin, FeedReader (desktop RSS reader for Windows, like the KDE one)