Hello, I thought this might interest the web development guys. I have implemented an RSS feed of the recent posts on Computing.Net. The RSS intro page is not linked on the site yet, but you can find it by going here. I know RSS isn't all that big. I believe Computing.Net's feed will really shine for syndication of the content onto other sites. An RSS feed is much better than just a link. Anyway, I'm no expert on this stuff. Try out the feed in your viewers. Let me know if there are any problems. If I don't see anything, I'll place links to the feed around the site. Justin

I'm curious...Does anyone even have an RSS reader? This was the first I'd heard of the technology. If I had a website like mesich's or many of the other people on here I would probably use it, assuming I could tell it which forums from which to take the newest 5 or 10 posts. -SN

Hi Justin, SN, hi everyone To my surprise, Wmikke (14 yrs) has FeedDemon installed. Well it isn't that big a surprise, I had seen the program a while back. Didn't pay to much attention to it as I didn't see the benefits of it. His website also seems to have RSS Feed? installed. %-) Not sure if this is meant for the grant public to be notified on updates at the site, or for his own convenience to know when others contribute with a script or article. As for myself it was the first time I'd heard about it as well. Now I'm trying to figure out how this can be of a benefit for Computing.net and mesich.com among others. :-) I had a little reader installed earlier today, but already got rid of it. Trying it out, obviously, I used Computing.net. The reader was to limited in my opinion. No more then 9 items could be displayed, no information in regard to which forum (Windows 9x, Windows ME, Windows NT etc.) the threads belong to was displayed, couldn't save the items for off-line reading (not that I need that, cable connection), no way to go back to the thread you posted on earlier. The reader I had installed was, Blago RSS newsreader. The next one I'll be trying out aside of FeedDemon as it's installed on the computer Wmikke is usually on, is FeedReader. (http://www.feeddemon.com) (http://www.feedreader.com) So far I've read some parts of these two articles, What is RSS and RSS 2.0 Specification (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html?page=1) (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss) Best Regards and Wishes, The Count, Co-webmaster of mesich.com

Hello, The reason it doesn't say what forum is not the reader's fault. The feed just doesn't include that information. Most forum sites that have "most recent threads" don't list the specific forum of each thread. I suppose its more of a teaser for what's inside the site, not really intended to replace actually going into the forum and looking around. As for offline reading, I think the whole point of RSS is to manage a lot of information in one customizable format. You can look at the brief descriptions of this information and decide whether or not to read further. Since its not trying to replace web browsers (just enhance them), "offline reading" might be a reduntant feature. Those are just my thoughts. Justin

This is a good thing. "Does anyone even have an RSS reader?" It's just an XML file - a very simply set of tags really. If you specify an XSLT you can view the formated results any browser. There are even javascript interfaces for XSLT - Mozilla has one. Why every browser does not have a default transformation system is a neglected matter. We should not have to have readers, we have whole display systems in every browser (some better than others). Smart news readers have been scrapping webpages for years, RSS just makes it trivial. There's a fast overview of RSS here. The reason RSS is popular is because it is simple, ready for scrapping, and easy to create (even through automated means).