RSS

After a week away and a week catching up, I am now back to the blog ...

Today's excitement has been playing around with RSS. We have an awful lot of content on our VLE support site, and I'm sure that hardly anyone looks at it (let alone looks at the new stuff we create). So, I have decided to see whether I can get RSS working; that way we can choose the highlights of the site and push them to other places (for example to the login screen of our VLE, and the homepage of our support site). So far, so good. I have managed to dust off my coding skills and write some basic XML, and have used an external parser to get stuff showing on the site. I have also downloaded an aggregator/reader and have news flowing onto my desktop (hurrah - I can see what Gordon Brown is doing in the Budget as I type!).

Pretty exciting stuff ... a long time ago, when I worked on a library resources gateway site, I remember reading about 'push' technology which claimed to bring information to you rather than you having to go out and find it yourself. Looks like I managed to get something like that working today (only 8 years after reading the original article!)

The next set is to get the feeds nicely formatted using CSS (need to dust off those skills too!)