RSS Tools – Page 5

Library Blog Aggregator

What if your library provides so many RSS feeds your patrons can’t keep track of them? The University of Alabama in Huntsville built a nice tool in response to this situation: The UAH Library Feed Aggregator. It pulls together the RSS feeds from the library’s Flickr feed, two library blogs, a Huntsville events feed, the New York Times, and the Huntsville weather forecast.
The site has a very clear layout, making it easy to see what’s recent and what’s old. The library’s aggregator provides a single place for its patrons to see all the news important to its patrons.

[Via the UAH Library Blog.]

EBSCO and RSS Alerts

Paul Pival learned something interesting about EBSCO, EZProxy, and RSS feeds: if you don’t edit your EZProxy configuration just so, RSS alerts for saved searches in EBSCO databases get rewritten to pass through your library’s proxy server. And if that happens, off-campus users (including aggregators like Bloglines or Google Reader) can’t get to the RSS feed. (The link to each new item from the database in the feed is still routed through your proxy server so your patrons can still get to the full text at a single click.)
See the Distant Librarian for instructions. In short, all that’s needed is adding a single line to Useful Utilites’ standard EBSCO EZProxy configuration:

NeverProxy rss.ebscohost.com

I suppose other databases require similar proxy configuration changes. If you have examples, leave them in the comments.

Waiter, There’s a Diacritic in My Feed

How to best encode characters with diacritics in your RSS feed? That was the question posed in a thread on Web4Lib recently, started by a librarian working putting his new books list into an RSS feed. (A great idea in itself, of course.) Since many books, especially in an academic library, but also in other libraries with user communities speaking diverse languages, this is important — you want to be able to show the title properly, especially to speakers of the language for whom you’ve bought the book.
There are, of course, several ways to encode many diacritic marks (HTML character entities and Unicode, for example); finding the best one for RSS engendered some discussion.
The consensus in the discussion was that using character references is the best solution, particularly for the item title, which is arguably the most important part of an RSS item to get right (OK, the URL is also critical). If users cannot understand the title, why would they click to the full text?
Character references take the form

&#1234;

The numbers refer to the actual character; “402” is a ƒ or “florin”; “247” is a ÷ or division symbol. And so on… For a list of common character references, see this entities table.

Best Practices for Building RSS 2.0 Feeds

Like many standards, the RSS 2.0 Specification provides detailed instructions for what elements must or may be in an RSS feed and, in broad terms, how to format them. However, the specification does not — nor should it — provide detailed guidance on what to put in the various elements.
That’s where the Really Simple Syndication Best Practices Profile comes in. Published by the RSS Advisory Board, the group that has responsibility for maintaining the RSS Specification, the RSS Best Practices Profile offers guidelines on how to format an RSS document for the widest possible audience of aggregators, feed readers, and other tools. The Board tested feeds against a range of aggregators: Bloglines, BottomFeeder 4.4, FeedDemon 2.5 (2.5.0.10), Google Reader, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 2.0 (2.0.9), My Yahoo, NewsGator Online and Opera 9 (9.22).
This document is aimed at developers more than at bloggers — the blog tools we all use already create RSS feeds — but when we build systems that generate RSS for our users, doing so in the format that has the best chance of providing users with the same experience, regardless of where they consume the feed, is a good idea. For each required or optional element in the RSS specification, this document says what the specification requires and how best to implement that requirement in practice. Some selected recommendations from the guide:

Author: The Board suggests that, for individually authored blogs (where everything is written by the same person), the item’s author element be omitted in favor of the channel’s managingEditor or webMaster element.
Category: The Board recommends that the category element provide the full hierarchy of the category term, not just the term itself. In other words, a category of “dogs” would be better as (and I’m making this up) “animals/canines/dogs”.
Description: The Board makes the common-sense suggestion that, when there are links in an item’s description element to other pages on the same site as the blog that the links be fully qualified URLs (for example, http://www.rss4lib.com/index.html), not relative URLs (/index.html).

By taking some simple steps to generate RSS feeds so they will be read and understood by the most common feed readers and aggregators, you can broaden the audience for your content and help ensure that your readers have a uniform experience regardless of where they consume your RSS content.

Directory of College and University Feeds

New to me, perhaps not new to you: Peterson’s College and University Feed Directory. Broken down by kind (several examples: Libraries-General, Research Centers, and Schools and Programs) and searchable, it includes hundreds of feeds from academic institutions. Topics are available as OPML feeds.
It is not as comprehensive as I would like (for example, my library’s new books feeds and news feeds are not included), but this site does provide a decent overview of what is available in terms of academic feeds. There is an “Add URL function, to which I’ve submitted the aforementioned feeds.

[Via Vtech.]

Bloglines Supports Cascading Style Sheets

Bloglines latest innovation will blur the line between reading a news item in its “native” form and reading it via RSS even further. In an announcement Tuesday (18 September), Bloglines released limited support for Cascading Style Sheets within blog posts that it displays.
In other words, if I’m doing this right, if you are reading this at Bloglines (or at RSS4Lib.com), this paragraph will have a bright blue background. That’s because I added the inline style “style=’background-color: #00A0E1′” to the <span> tag that starts this paragraph.
Bloglines has restricted the range of CSS values it allows — to prevent clever (or malicious) RSS creators from wreaking havoc with the interface. A (lengthy) list of allowed styles is on the Bloglines site.
While offering its users a richer reading experience, Bloglines is also making the distinction between the blog page and the RSS feed even smaller.

ticTOCs: Journal Tables of Contents

I read in this week’s FreePint Newsletter about a grant-funded project called “ticTOCs. This a tool to bring journal tables of contents (the TOCs) from multiple publishers to patrons through an interface as simple as ticking off a series of boxes. From ticTOCs in a Nutshell:

In March 2005 there were 1,139 journal TOC RSS feeds available from 13 publishers, and by October 2006 this had risen to 7,042 feeds from 38 publishers. In addition, there are third party feeds from services such as Zetoc and Ingenta. Today, therefore, there are metadata syndication possibilities for TOCs. The way it works just now suits some people, however it requires some understanding of the concepts, and can be confusing. There are various publisher websites and feeds and aggregator feeds, various desktop readers and web-based readers, and various confusing icons.

While this project is still in development, it shows promise for standardizing the interface and content available from publishers (some of whom, we know, provide titles and links while others add abstracts, tagging, or other information to their table of contents feeds). ticTOCs will be a layer on top of RSS making it simpler for information-seekers to get the tables of contents they want, in a consistent and reliable format.

[Via Library Stuff.]

RSS and the Media: Lessons for Libraries

A recent study by the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda focused on International News and Problems with the News Media’s RSS Feeds. While this study examined 19 major international news services, ranging from ABC News to The Guardian to Al Jazeera’s English service, it draws some lessons that are applicable to libraries as well.

In detailed conclusions, the study noted several problems with RSS as implemented by the news organizations included in the study:

RSS is not well used for tracking specific news topics throughout the day — but it is well suited for a daily recap: “[I]f a user wants specific news on any subject from any of the 19 news outlets the research team looked at, he or she must still track the news down website by website.”
News services often only include their own content in feeds, not content drawn from traditional news syndicators like AP or Reuters. Relying on the New York Times’ feed, for example, would lead one to believe that nothing of note happens throughout the day, between the press time of one day’s issue and the next. USA Today, in contrast, includes other new services’ content in its feeds, providing a more frequently updated service. “[W]hat is lost by the Times not sending the wire service articles are valuable updates on storiesâand a breadth of stories that the Times can’t hope to duplicate with its own staff … which is, after all, presumably why they make the stories accessible on their website in the first place.”
RSS feed items often do not provide sufficient attribution to identify where that partiuclar [sic] item came from. “All the RSS feeds from the news outlets previewed their stories with a headline and a line or two of description, but very few of the outlets gave additional important information: the date the story was from, the story’s byline (author) and dateline (where the story originated), and the time the story was posted.” Since RSS feeds exist to be widely distributed, not including this basic information in a feed item can mean that the reader of it may not recognize it as valuable or coming from a trusted source.

Libraries should take these — and the other conclusions in the full report — into consideration. RSS provides a wealth of benefits to libraries that use it: ease of replicating content across a site, getting the word out, sharing news and information with community groups. Yet that value can be diminished if a few common-sense actions are ignored. When you build your feed, make sure that the serendipitous recipient of a given item can easily discern who wrote it, when it was written, and who published it. Give your reader the opportunity to recognize your organization’s good name and reputation — and your feed the opportunity to build trust and confidence in you.

Databases with RSS Alerts

The University of Wisconsin libraries maintain a list of database vendors that provide RSS feeds as an alert option. With RSS alerts, once you save a search, you can receive updates via your favorite RSS reader (or embed the alert feed on a subject web page). You — and your patrons — will always have the latest database results. Where vendor provide help pages, these are also linked.

While some of the big database vendors — Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, EBSCOhost, ScienceDirect, and SpringerLink, to name a few — are included, it’s surprising how few are actually listed. Alerts by RSS should be on everyone’s wish list when it comes time to renew contracts with database providers. RSS alerts are an incredibly easy method to keep your patrons current on whatever interests them.

Library 2.0 Seminar at Ohio State University

I gave a talk at The Ohio State University’s Library 2.0 seminar today. My talk was titled “RSS Basics and Beyond: Tips and Tricks for Getting the Most out of Syndicated Content.” In it, I gave an overview of RSS, feed aggregators, and showed several easy ways libraries can take advantage of RSS to improve communication with their patrons, communities, and staffs. OSU has a copy of the handout.

If you’re an RSS4Lib reader and will be at part two on Thursday, introduce yourself!

UPDATE 5 July 2007: OSU taped and digitized the presentations at the conference. You can see mine (RSS Basics and Beyond) or link to any of the others on the Library 2.0 Seminar web site.