On The Web

One nice feature of b2 is that it can automatically generate RSS. I had not played around with RSS before, so I started perusing sites to learn what it's all about. Basically, RSS is a XML file that describes content on your site. In particular, content like headline news and blog entries, anything that is added on a regular basis. The XML file is in a standard format that contains information about the entries. So, the beauty of RSS is that there is a standard way to get information from other sites.

Aggregator - Collects feeds for directory or display
Feed (Channel) - A source of content
Reader (Viewer) - A client side application that can retrieve remote RSS files and allow reading of the remote content.
Scraper - Converts HTML to RSS
Validator - Checks an RSS file if it's standards compliant.

It all hooks up like this:
A site produces a feed (RSS file). The feed is submitted to an aggregator to let the world know about it. A viewer subscribes to an aggregator or directly to the site feed. The end user selects an item to view and opens a browser to view the content from the site with the feed.

RSS Links