Syndicate News from a MKDoc Website

There are several formats avaliable for the syndication of news feeds from MKDoc web sites. RSS 0.9, RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0 and JavaScript.

All the formats present a listing of the latest documents that have been added to the MKDoc site. Listings can also be gathered from anywhere within an MKDoc website, for example you can add headline.js to the address of any document to get the listing of the latest sub-documents.

RSS 0.9

The RSS 0.9 specification was developed by Netscape for the my.netscape.com. It allows for the syndication of up to 15 headlines.

To retrive a RSS 0.9 listing of the latest documents added to a MKDoc web site you just need to add rss090headline.rdf to the end of any documents address.

This is how this page is represented in a RSS 0.9 file:

<item>
  <title>Syndicate News from a MKDoc Website</title>
  <link>http://mkdoc.com/help/howto/syndicate_news/</link>
</item>

RSS 0.91

There are several RSS 0.91 specifications, the Userland RSS 0.91 specification, the Netscape RSS 0.91 specification and and the the Netscape RSS 0.91 Revision 3.

A RSS 0.91 file can be accessed by adding rss091headline.rdf at the end of any MKDoc document address.

This is how this page is represented in a RSS 0.91 file:

<item>
  <title>Syndicate News from a MKDoc Website</title>
  <link>http://mkdoc.com/help/howto/syndicate_news/</link>
  <description>
    MKDoc is set up to export headlines in a variety of formats
    for inclusion into other web sites. This HOWTO explains
    how to set this up.
  </description>
</itemg>

RSS 1.0

There are two RSS 1.0 specification feeds available on MKDoc web sites, RSS Headlines, rss100headline.rdf and RSS Sitemaps, rss100sitemap.rdf.

RSS 1.0 has support for Dublin Core Metadata. As a result, quite a lot more information can be included in the RSS file. This is how this page is represented in a RSS 1.00 file:

<item rdf:about="http://mkdoc.com/help/howto/syndicate_news/">
  <title>Syndicate News from a MKDoc Website</title>
  <link>http://mkdoc.com/help/howto/syndicate_news/</link>
  <description>
    MKDoc is set up to export headlines in a variety of formats 
    for inclusion into other web sites. This HOWTO explains
    how to set this up.
  </description>
  <dc:subject>
    MKDoc; syndicate; RSS; headline; news; feed; javascript
  </dc:subject>
  <dc:creator>Croome, Chris</dc:creator>
  <dc:rights>Copyright © 2002 MKDoc Ltd.</dc:rights>
  <dc:language>en-gb</dc:language>
  <dc:publisher>
    MKDoc Ltd. c/o webarchitects, PO Box 1660,
    Sheffield, S7 1XF, UK.
  </dc:publisher>
  <dc:date>2001-04-24T14:19:53Z</dc:date>
</item>

If you want to see how a RSS 1.00 feed can be rendered as HTML then the Redland RSS 1.0 Viewer is a great tool. Try entering http://mkdoc.com/rss100headline.rdf or http://mkdoc.com/rss100sitemap.rdf into the online form with format as a box selected.

JavaScript

This is the easiest way to get headlines from a MKDoc website onto another site. All you need to do is add this line of code a web page:

<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://mkdoc.com/news/headline.js"></script>

And this is the result:

Further Resources

RSS Info has news, and lots of links to RSS resources. It's the best place to start if you want to find out more about RSS.

The Open Directory Project RSS links section has a large collection of RSS resources.