Newcastle University

News Feeds (RSS)

What is an RSS feed?

RSS an acronym for Really Simple Syndication, and it is a form of XML. Fortunately, you don't need to know that, you just need to know what it's for and how to make use of it. As ever, these pages make use of PHP. It's not terribly complicated and most of the examples here should be pretty easy for you to paste into your sites and tinker with.

What is an RSS feed?

It's a simple format that News and content providers can use to allow others to syndicate their headlines on their websites. RSS feeds can be read by programmes called aggregators, which are available in all kinds of forms (desktop, web, mobile phones etc), but we're specifically interested in outputting these RSS feeds on the web.

To the right is one from the BBC.

We can make use of a free PHP application called Magpie to read this and display it in a more friendly format. Magpie is available for download, but we have installed and customised a copy on the university servers with an extra function or two to make your life easier.

In the examples that follow, we use Magpie and PHP code to read and write XML for the RSS feeds. The examples require web publishing skills and a basic knowledge of PHP (to start with anyway...) but require no knowledge of XML or the technical structure of RSS itself. If you want to know more, the W3C has the technical specifications but webmonkey has an explanation.

Where can I find them?

UKOLN maintains a list of UK academic RSS feeds. Please note that the University is not responsible for external content, if your RSS feed is from a source outside the university, a disclaimer will automatically be added (as in the BBC example above).

NEXT: Displaying RSS: an example or two