This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Mark Harrison. Original Post: Really Simple Syndication Feed Title: Mark Harrison Feed URL: http://markharrison.co.uk/blog/xml.aspx Feed Description: .NET Portals, Collaboration and eBiz Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Mark Harrison Latest Posts From Mark Harrison

In my view, one of the most useful web technologies that has recently appeared and rapidly adopted must be RSS which is a standard for syndicating information and the content of news like sites. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is just an XML document containing a list of content items. For example, check out this RSS document which is the RSS feed for my blog - so you will see this item that you are reading located near the top of the RSS document.

Using an aggregator like SharpReader I am now able to scan daily through very many more web sites than I previously achieved with a standard web browser - thus making it much easier and more efficient to find key nuggets of information and recent news items.

An example of syndicating content using RSS is that I have used the standard SharePoint XML web part on some of the Microsoft Intranet sites to display a frequently updated list of news items - along with links to access the original items in their entirety. This web part requires an XSLT file to transform the RSS feed into displayable HTML - email me if you want a copy of the XSLT that I use. Alternatively Tim Heuer has create a RSS Web Part.

I now believe you should always include an RSS feed on every web site that contains frequently changing content. If you site is implemented using Content Management Server, then the Publishing API enables you to write a few lines of code to trawl through a channel and programmatically generate an RSS document listing the channels content. Alternatively, if you do not want to develop this functionality then you can download a free copy of CMSRSS from SnowValley.

RSS is not difficult to implement and using Google you will find loads of resources on how to do this. The user sample area on GotDotNet has a lot of RSS code samples on how to do this - for example the RSS library.