NetworkWorld.com's DIY RSS feed
NOTE: This is now basically a deprecated service. We currently offer more than 75 pre-built RSS feeds on a variety of specific enterprise topics. However, please feel free to play around with this search-engine-driven RSS generator.
• What this is
• What you need
• Getting just the feed you want
• Checking your feed to see if it works
• Formatting the feed for your site
• Refining your feed
• Other RSS feeds
• Questions?
What this is
RSS is an XML subset designed to let Web sites - and individuals - grab headlines from Web sites. Our Do-It-Yourself RSS Feed combines RSS with a dynamic query into our search engine to let you get the latest Network World Fusion headlines on topics you specify. This means you can give users of your site the latest headlines on networking news - everything from specific technologies (from ASPs to XML) to particular vendors and service providers (Cisco or AT&T, say).
Our available RSS feeds include breaking news, reviews, columns, newsletters and in-depth features.
You can get a basic RSS overview in this RSS tutorial and more detailed info at O'Reilly's RSS DevCenter. The OASIS RSS page has still more links and info.
What you need
By itself, an RSS feed is of limited use - unless you like reading raw XML. You'll need an application or script that can read the RSS and then convert it into HTML. Fortunately, there are tools in a variety of scripts available. This site has links to many of them, incouding tools for Java, Perl, Python and ASP. You can also download desktop apps if you want to create your own personal headline reader. An interesting tool is Radio UserLand, which you can use to build a Weblog from RSS feeds or just use as a desktop RSS reader. Costs $39.95
Getting just the feed you want
Now into the nitty-gritty. What makes all this possible is the way you can pass variables into our search engine (Inktomi Enterprise Search) via a URL. To create a DIY RSS Feed, you'll need to customize our generic RSS search query (NOTE: That should be one line!):
http://search.networkworld.com/diy/query.html?col=archive1&col=newslett& qt=keywords%3A%22WORD%22&dt=in&inthe=7776000&nh=5&rf=1&lk=1&st=1
Probably the first thing to do is to copy the above text into a text editor so that you can modify it (it should come out as one long line; if not, you'll need to rejoin the pieces).
The key segment in the URL is
WORD
which you'll find in the middle of the string (or at character 82). Delete WORD and type in the word or phrase you want to create a feed for (see below for more info on inputting a phrase).
A single word is easy: Just type it in. To be on the safe side, always type it in lower case: cisco instead of Cisco (the above URL relies on our document meta-tagging to work; unfortunately, sometimes we slip up and fail to capitalize proper names). For example:
cisco
To search for a specific phrase, type the words, separated by a plus sign, example:
gigabit+ethernet
Note: When building a feed on a specific company, your best bet is to just use its more common name, rather than its official name. So use cisco instead of cisco+systems. Naturally, there are some exceptions: computer+associates will get you better results than ca.
Checking your feed to see if it works
OK, you've typed in your keyword(s) and you're ready to start using it.
The first step is probably to see if we actually have any articles in our database about the particular topic. Use this search form to check:
You probably also want to make sure the resulting feed is valid XML. For that, you can can use UserLand Software's RSS Validator. Paste the URL you created into the form and hit enter. If everything is OK, great! If not, make sure you didn't inadvertently delete something in the URL while you were creating it out of the generic example above. NOTE: Unfortunately, sometimes, this validator gives spurious error messages on our feed (possibly related to the odd URLs). XML Cooktop is a free Windows XML editor that you can also use to ensure your URL works.
Formatting the feed for your site
One good thing about RSS is that it has no formatting whatsoever. That means it's entirely up to you what the resulting headlines look like. Wrap them in div or span tags (or even a font tag if you prefer) with your preferred styles and voila: They fit right into the look and feel of your site. Because the source of the feed is fairly generic, you probably want to put a line above or next to the feed telling your users what it is - VPN news for example.
Refining your feed
This is where it gets interesting.
The generic URL above relies on the fact that Network World reporters and editors make heavy use of meta tags to describe their articles. The keywords in the URL actually limits your search to the meta keywords tag they use. The advantage of this is that the stories are far more likely to be relevant to a particular feed (at least, according to the criteria our reporters and editors use). For example, you'll only get stories that are really about Microsoft, rather than every single story that is really about some other company's product that happens to have a Windows NT version. There are some specific keyword phrases we use regularly for internal purposes that you might want to use for your own site:
vendor+profiles - Use this if you want to create a feed that is more about corporate earnings, CEO changes, acquisitions and the like than about specific products. (we also have a more narrowly defined keyword just for earnings).
microsoft+antitrust - Keep up with the latest in Microsoft' ongoing legal affairs.
lawsuits - Speaking of which, this keyword will give you the latest news on lawsuits involving networking vendors and service providers.
dotnet - Articles about .Net (our search engine, like many others, doesn't know what to do with the dot).
hp/compaq - For the latest news on their merger attempt.
voip - Voice over IP.
metro+ethernet - Metropolitan Ethernet.
savings - We're running a series of articles on ways to save money, from software to services. This word will get you the latest.
10g - 10-Gigabit Ethernet.
The disadvantage of relying on our keywords is if we miss something. If you think we are - or if you really do want a feed listing every last story that mentions some word, no matter how far down in the story - you can delete the requirement that the search engine only search our keywords field by deleting:
keywords%3A
from the URL. Instead, the search-engine will do a more traditional full-text search. Be aware that, depending on the word or phrase, result in a fairly high number of irrelevant or only loosely relevant links, however.
Because the search engine supports Boolean logic, you can create feeds that use NOT logic. You'll notice in the generic url that
word is bracketed by
%22...%22 To add a NOT word to that, right after the second %22, add
+-word, like this:
%22hp/compaq%22+-gates
That would bring up stories on the HP/Compaq merger that don't also have Gates in the body of the story. To narrow it down to stories that don't have Gates as a keyword:
%22hp/compaq%22+-keywords%3Agates
To block stories with specific phrases, the basic syntax is:
+-%22word1+word2%22
As in the previous example, that would exclude stories with that phrase in the body of the document.
The generic URL will give you back a maximum of five links. You can change that by altering
nh=5
to whatever number you'd prefer.
Other RSS feeds
Computerworld offers a large number of RSS feeds related to IT. InfoWorld offers several RSS feeds as well. O'Reilly's Meerkat is a big aggregator of application-development RSS feeds from around the 'Net. Get directions for getting specific RSS feeds out of its database.
Questions?
Mail Executive Editor Adam Gaffin.
