RSS: Simple protocol makes internet programmable

rss| Programming | internet

There was a report on the Duandun of KFC's French fries in 2001. You can see a more efficient management system: for a global enterprise such as fast food restaurants: to ensure that the quality of French fries is basically the same, the cheapest method must depend on the machine rather than the chef, and if the potato chips are different in shape, the machine's complexity and maintenance costs will be high. So the potatoes must be in strict accordance with industry standards to make the simpler structure of the French fries machine to produce the standard French fries. RSS and KFC's potato standards are the same, reflecting the social division of the refinement: simple/reliable specification means a less efficient division of labor and a richer application.

What is rss:real simple Syndication best to express the original meaning of RSS

For the developers of application services: between application and application, the data exchanged between Enterprise and enterprise is like potatoes, cabbage, the interface designed according to strict XML standard does greatly simplify the late processing machine cost of downstream development: You can compare the browsers that handle HTML Web pages, For example: IE and Firefox and other software installed after the size of more than 10M, but the general processing of XML Parser toolkit generally in hundreds of k is enough. In the next 2, 3 years, with the development of mobile terminals, such as mobile phone hardware configuration than the lower device environment is particularly important.

Apply production/agent/Retail mode: And these links are highly effective: it is rss/xml related standards.

Manufacturer: RSS Producers include blogs/news websites, etc.;

Agent: RSS aggregation service: Feedburner/rss Search Service TechnoRati

Retailer: RSS reader (RSS reader/browser)

You can also see the shadow of some MVC (the Model-view-controller) pattern.

Here are some examples: see how RSS makes the Internet richer

The programmability of RSS: an example of online bookmarking service del.icio.us

Viewed from its own interface, del.icio.us is very simple:

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But del.icio.us has a variety of RSS interfaces for other applications:

The simplest RSS application: del.icio.us RSS can be used by other sites for remote synchronization: for example, I will be my bookmark as a linkblog: And my own often see a few blog aggregation together, synchronized in my personal Portal: a page of the world.

Others use the del.icio.us open RSS interface to develop richer applications, such as: Extispicious can display your "brain map" based on the number of tags you bookmark.

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Hublog:graph del.icio.us Related tags will be del.icio.us All users collection of tag for the summary classification, you can see the different users of the tag "three-dimensional" contact:

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As can be seen from these applications: if based on traditional HTML, the same function implementation will become very complex and unstable, the cost of reproduction and exchange of data is very high. So: theUltimate contribution of the RSS feed is to make most of the Web site programmable : Similar examples also have a blog: TrackBack Ping and other mechanisms, these mechanisms are dependent on XML/RPC implementation. The original purpose of designing a Rss/xml interface for Lucene was to make full-text search services easily embedded into applications and to achieve richer correlations between various content (well referenced) through keywords.

Some of the other RSS extension services are:

RSS reading: Online Services Vs. Clients

The client does make it easier to make RSS a high-end user of everyday work:

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Many tools (Radiouserland Newzcrawler) can set up the blog publishing System account number: MT blogger in the reading process while watching while publishing comments, very suitable for the network "bee" use.

But like email: custom Web-Interface emails still make up the majority, so online services will still prevail. and the RSS reading function will eventually be integrated by most email clients, such as the current Thunderbird.

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RSS as XML aggregation redistribution tool: RSS Agent

If you use the del.icio.us link blog at the same time, also like to use Flickr photo blog, while writing your own movabletype/ WordPress blog and blogger.com Services, how to facilitate the user through an RSS feed all your sources of information? FeedBurner has more than one function: It can combine multiple data sources in RSS.

A data source that needs to be subscribed multiple times: Now you can use the HTTP://FEEDS.FEEDBURNER.COM/BLOG2 URL and add XSLT, which allows you to see more readable content directly in a higher version of IE browser:

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FeedBurner also offers some embedding of commercial content, such as Amazon's advertising campaign and the latest Google AdSense support.

Many of the RSS feeds have the add my Yahoo!/Subscribe with Bloglines connection:

are transformed from the original distributed RSS subscriptions to some semi-centric services: the benefits of a central service is the division of labor, can save the blog publisher's RSS bandwidth, because a lot of RSS software at a certain time on the server, so for some of the bandwidth-constrained virtual host users, Often there will be insufficient bandwidth, to the center of the large agent, is indeed a solution. The center's agents , because they serve many RSS subscribers, can take advantage of local caching to improve delivery efficiency: It also reduces the access pressure to RSS data sources. Therefore: for the RSS Center service provider: The main solution is a caching mechanism problem:

USER1 \/RSS1

USER2-[rss Cache]-RSS2

USER3/

Although there are some central risks: but just as people have rarely made their own steamed buns, more rich functions should be added or should be carried out by professional agents.

Other featured services, RSS dead-chain checking and fault-tolerant design:

If there is an error in the RSS data source, Bloglines will make some hints. RSS Browser If you really rely on the strict XML parser, I think the ultimate winner will still be the best RSS fault-tolerant tool and provide calibration services platform. Now the nonstandard RSS is too much, RSS URI design also need to pay attention to avoid the use of Dynamic Web pages: So in OPML export can avoid a lot of & no transfer caused by XML parsing errors.

User behavior analysis based on click Statistics:

Attention.xml This standard is specifically based on the statistical output clicked by the user: similar to the dynamic Start menu on the Windows desktop. It can be fed to the publisher of the content according to the user's click behavior (Time, URL, content statistics).

The SNS analysis between RSS:

The advent of RSS also reduces the difficulty of search engine crawling: Technorati is a blog search engine (in the background is also Lucene), the data source is implemented by the user submitted blog: will also hint at Technorati member of the Mutual reference relationship

Automatic classification of RSS:

RSS is a grassroots news, in order to improve many users have to use some combination of words to express some special theme, the form is similar to the wiki with the camelword:10placesinmycity 10BooksIRead yahoo360share. The searchfriendly can make the relationship between the individuals behind the RSS and their reference relationships interwoven into a more complex network view of relationships, and the link between the credit mechanism and the search engine is very approximate to the web ranking mechanism.

RSS as an online bookmark:

If you have a collection of hundreds of RSS, RSS bookmark Management is a big problem, OPML is the corresponding XML standard format, the general RSS reader Support OPML RSS bookmark Import and export. My own opml:http://www.chedong.com/cache/opml.xml.

Summary:

I think RSS is the current online news media Evolution: Content producers (bloggers) and content Distributors (Feedburner/bloglines) and the content of the recipient (RSS reader/browser) because of the standard of RSS has more choice and presentation. And the past news mode, based on RSS news dissemination: More extensive data sources (BLOGGER), the user can choose more (agents), the user's customizable degree is higher (browser), And not necessarily have to endure the current many news sites too big home: Amazon's Lite version is a good example.

Content providers more focused on the development of content, with a simple API, many sites can be the original interface more complex site can do more lite point, become a better distributor. But RSS also makes it easy to copy/mirror the content of the site, which is not good news for search engines.