XML::Feed Syndication feed parser and auto-discovery

Syndication means that when you publish your blog, Blogger automatically generates a machine-readable representation of your blog that can be picked up and displayed on other web sites and information aggregation tools. For more information on enabling your feed, see How do I change my site feed settings? in Blogger Help.

About Syndication and RSS If you're new to RSS and syndication on the web, this page can offer you a brief explanation of the changes that RSS and syndication is bringing to Internet publishing and browsing.

Starting next week I will join Microsoft's Windows Live division to create a new product team around syndication technologies such as RSS and Atom. I will help build a feed syndication platform leveraged by Microsoft products and developers all around the world. I am excited to construct a team and product from scratch focused on scalability and connecting syndication clients and their users wherever they may exist: desktop, mobile, media center, gaming console, widget, gadget, and more.

If terms like feed, syndication, and RSS make your head spin, stop right now and read an Introduction to Syndication. That will give you a good overview of feeds and syndication. We have an article on WordPress Feeds to help you understand the basics, if you need them, but from here on, this article assumes that you know the basics of what feeds are and how they are used.

What Does This Mean? You may recognize the universal feed icon or these “chicklets” from your favorite Web sites, blogs and podcasts. These icons represent content in any format — text, audio or video — to which you can subscribe and read/watch/listen using a feed reader. What's that?

We are in just the exploratory phases of a project to provide our Web site users with RSS-type updated content (news, sports, weather, etc.). Are there options, paid or otherwise, to use RSS feeds in such a commercial setting? All the sources I've found so far state that they are for "non-commercial" use only... I've contacted a number of them to see if there is a commercial use option, but have yet to hear back from anyone.

WHERE IS YOUR FEED? Syndication feeds have become a predictable blog feature. But finding them on a site can be a bit unpredictable. Digging around in my blogroll today, I began to notice that syndication feeds on blogs tend to have inconsistent naming and design approaches, and that this was a potential problem.

Jeff Barr conceived of the Syndic8 concept in August of 2001. He designed and built the site, the database, and the code. He is also responsible for the day-to-day operation of the site, and is constantly poking, prodding, and tuning the code to add features, remove bugs, and increase performance. Bill Kearney participates in the test and design of the Syndic8.com feature set. In addition, his work as editor and evangelist has helped lead to a better developer understanding of RSS and increased quality of feeds. Bill is located in Bethesda, Maryland.

RSS is one of a new breed of technologies that is contributing to the ever-expanding dominance of the Web as the pre-eminent, global information medium. It is intimately connected with—though not bound to—social environments such as blogs and wikis, annotation tools such as del.icio.us [1], Flickr [2] and Furl [3], and more recent hybrid utilities such as JotSpot [4], which are reshaping and redefining our view of the Web that has been built up and sustained over the last 10 years and more [n1]. Indeed, Tim Berners-Lee's original conception of the Web [5] was much more of a shared collaboratory than the flat, read-only kaleidoscope that has subsequently emerged: a consumer wonderland, rather than a common cooperative workspace. Where did it all go wrong?