RSS Feeds and its Implementation at INFLIBNET

Abstract

RSS is a Web 2.0 technology that is being used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favourite websites. In the ‘old days’ of the web to keep track of updates on a website visitors had to ‘bookmark’ websites in their browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added. RSS has become a valuable technology for everything from casual web users to webmasters. According to a recent Yahoo survey only 12% of internet users are aware of RSS and a mere 4% have knowingly used RSS. The paper discusses about the different aspects of RSS such as meaning of RSS, evolution of RSS, how to create RSS and how to get / read RSS Feeds including basics of XML, which is the basic language for writing programs for RSS Feeds. At the end of this paper, details of the project about the INFLIBNET’s RSS Reader is also discussed.