RSS ARCHIVING: KEEPING IT CURRENT WITH RSS ROBERT KIFFE| OMNIUPDATE

Agenda Understanding RSS How to make RSS even BETTER Hands-On Q&A This workshop will serve to help you understand how RSS works, and once you have that foundational understanding, we can talk about how to make it even more dynamic, with topics like using tags for categorization, and doing yearly RSS archives.

RSS – the Building Blocks RSS = Really Simple Syndication General Process: Make RSS Feeds Put RSS Items inside RSS Items reference content (the “full story”) Can create Feed Groups in OU Campus Treat multiple feeds as one big feed RSS has three main components: The feed, the item, and the article or content the item references. Feeds are empty containers that hold your items together. This is what a user “subscribes” to, or what we choose when we want to display news on a page. However, a feed in and of itself is very boring. It needs items inside of it to be useful. Each Item corresponds to one article. The item will give you the basic information about what you want to read, such as the title, a brief description of the article, when the article was published, the author, and maybe even a little thumbnail image. The thing to remember is that the RSS item is not the article itself. It merely references the full article via a link. That link points us to a webpage, which is where the full article resides. In the same way that a can of soup isn’t the soup itself, RSS items and the articles they reference are distinct items, but they are strongly associated with one another. Feed Item Content

RSS – the Building Blocks RSS Feeds are XML files There is a root node that will define any namespaces being used. There are a set of nodes that provide more information about the feed as a whole. Each article blurb is contained within an ‘item’ nodeset. Each article should at least carry those individual elements.

RSS in OU Campus Create feeds in Content > RSS Construct your “box” ADMINISTRATOR STEPS Create feeds in Content > RSS Construct your “box” Must be level 10 to see this Feed Groups made here too Next, assign feed to a directory using Access Settings This tells the system which “box” to put your “cans” in So, in OU Campus, how do we get RSS working? There are two main portions: the administrator steps that happen first, and then what end-users do later. For the Admin steps, we first need to create a feed (without a feed, items have nowhere to go, and they can’t be contained properly). Go to Content > RSS as a level 10 admin. Click New to start building the basics of a new feed. Save when you’ve added in all the basic info. Next, when the feed has been created, we need to assign it to a directory in OU Campus, so items created within that directory automatically know which feed they belong to. Hover over Edit > Access as an admin to edit Access Settings. Change the “RSS Feed” setting to your new feed.

RSS in OU Campus Making Items Once you’ve assigned a feed, time to make some items! News Item templates Edit > RSS for checked-out files Displaying items on pages Possibilities are endless, process varies from school to school Once the feed has been set up for a folder, content editors can start making items. Most schools will have specialized “news templates” that will make an item at the same time as you make a webpage. Use these for brand new news articles. You can also add an RSS item to any existing page in the folder by checking the page out from the Pages list view, hovering over Edit, and selecting RSS. When you have some items added to a feed, the final question is how the items are going to be displayed on your website. This process will vary from school to school, as everyone has different designs and different needs. Most schools will have some mechanism where you tell the page which feed it will use to display items from, and scripting will handle the rest.

RSS + Tags Apply tags to RSS items for categorization Cuts down on number of feeds you need Opens up neat filtering possibilities Easy to recategorize items after making them Most News Item templates allow you to add tags when you make the item You can add them after the fact by going to Edit > RSS To take your news items even further, you can apply tags to items to establish categories, and filter them as such. If you use tags, you can have one large “master” RSS feed and then filter that feed down by category, instead of having separate RSS feeds for each category. This is easier to manage, and makes it simpler to recategorize things after the fact.

Let’s Go Hands-On! Travel to http://workshop[#].outc18.com/index.html Replace [#] with the number on your badge Click the DirectEdit link Log in as the level 10 user! Username: admin Password: found on your badge Let’s go ahead and log into our sandboxes so we can make a new feed from scratch, and also dive into some more advanced topics, like archiving your RSS feeds.

THANK YOU! PLEASE SHARE YOUR FEEDBACK: WWW.SLIDO.COM #OUTC19