musings of wrath

For those of who have any idea what RSS is, this is neat! For those who don’t, well.. I can attempt to explain.

RSS is a protocol for extracting “news” from a particular source using a language called XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML is very similar to HTML, in the sense that it “describes” the data. It doesn’t, however, have any means of making the text appear different.

Anyways, an RSS aggregator is a program that will hit the RSS “feed” of several websites, and pull it up into a single page to view. Slashdot is, essentially, a news aggregator, and has several RSS feeds you can choose from. You can do all sorts of neat things with RSS feeds, as they’re written in XML, which the newer “HTML” is based upon. You can easily convert it into a block of HTML and have it spit back out as part of a web page. It’s how I got the posts from BEFORE I set up this weblog (from truth.mygamefactory.org) to appear in the blog. It pulled the information using RSS from the Truth website.

What happens when you combine this with AJAX? Well, it may not seem like a lot, but it allows for some really neat things. AJAX, as you may or may not know, allows a webpage to be a “gateway” to server-side instructions, but without reloading the page. That is, it gets around the “stateless” limitation on HTTP, and allows you to click a checkbox, and bam! A whole new page appears. Basically, what this aggregator does, is it keeps all of the actual operations of checking the news sites, database interaction and the like “behind” the page you’re cliking on. This means the view pane just adjusts when you click on a different site or article, retrieving the information directly. What’s REALLY cool about this takes some thinking to wrap my head around: I can read all the web-pages I like that support RSS all from one place. If there’s something new posted to the site, I’ll see it in the RSS feed almost immediately. I can then play around with how it looks and never have to worry about that site’s clunky or difficult to navigate interface again! I still read their content, and they know it, but I can instead enjoy the experience how I want to enjoy it.