Yesterday was a busy day in class where we explored both RSS Feeds and Blogs. The two items are synomous with each other. When creating the RSS Feed we took an example RSS Feed and edited to point to a resume or another online doucment. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndictaion and it comes in two flavours RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0. Atom is a third standard to create a feed.
Here is the samle RSS Feed that we used yesterday evening to edit:
<?xml version=”1.0″ ?>
<rss version=”2.0″ xmlns:atom=”http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom”>
<channel>
<atom:link href=”http://patrickrunfit.com/s603/patrick.xml” rel=”self” type=”application/rss+xml” />
<title>Patrick Patterson</title>
<link>http://www.patrickrunfit.com</link>
<description>My personal website</description>
<item>
<title>Resume</title>
<link>http://patrickrunfit.com/resume.html</link>
<description>Patricks Resume</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
The feed is located at http://www.patrickrunfit.com/s603/patrick.xml.
Inside the item tags in the name of a story that is made up of the feed. When looking at the feed in conjunction with a Blog the link and title that appears just below the channel element would be the name of the blog. The item relates to each post that you make to your blog.
Blogs can be used by one individual or several other people. A blog is essentially a Content Management System (CMS) consisting of three main components. The components are:
- Database – the database is the back end where all of the information is stored.
- Programming Language – is considered to be the middle layer that interacts between the interface and the database
- Interface – it is what we use to set up and configure the appearance of the blog
In class we used a self hosted Word Press blog as a group in which people were given different roles. Word Press consists of the following roles:
- Admin
- Editor
- Author
- Subscriber
- Contributor
Most CMS systems that I have used have some system of roles that determine what access you may or may not have within the system.
even though I always read blog either for personal or academic purpose, I never use the RSS feature. I used to click into it once and found the XML file then got no idea what to do at that time. Now I know it, thanks for the class!
Another interesting thing is that it also my first time to take another role of bloggars. I mean when we subscribe for the blog, we will be given the full authority of our own blog. It’s very nice to know another collaborative aspect of the blog that can be used in our profession.