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RSS and FirstClass
courtesy of Terry Whyte, Manager, Internet Services and Voice Services
Introduction: What is RSS and why do I care?
RSS is short for Real Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary, or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you listen to. I could get into definitions here, but for simplicity's sake I think I'll just say that readers who are interested can type RSS into Google and read the first five articles. For the rest of us, RSS is a technology which solves a couple of the Web's problems and which has given rise to some interesting applications. A few years ago, as the Web was getting popular, the nerds noticed that they were visiting web sites over and over again, just to see if anything had changed. This limited the number of sites you could reasonably keep track of in a day, so of course some code needed to be written.
The reason RSS has worked is simplicity. First off, the transport is vanilla HTTP GET requests, which are easily made by existing browsers, served up by existing web servers, and flow happily through existing networks, firewalls, and such. Secondly, the data is returned in one of a few XML-ish variants, all of which can be read pretty easily by people or computer programs. Finally, the data itself is mostly made up of a summary of what's new and a link to the original page, simple things that are very useful in the web universe. Think of RSS as web site change notification that is "pulled" by periodically checking for updates.
So what has the web community done with this new wonder? It started simply enough, with portal sites bringing news headlines in from newspaper sites. Pretty soon some clever fellows had entire web sites dedicated to amalgamating all the news feeds you were interested in; you visit one site and see what's new on 50 others. Next came news reader software you run on your machine to do the same thing, followed by integration of this functionality into web browsers. This progression of how users get RSS feeds has also led to a lot of new uses for them. The ability for users to track what happens on infrequently visited sites has given personal commentators the ability to reach large audiences without being "syndicated" onto large news sites – Blogging was born. The tidy data match between RSS and a browser bookmark has lead to
live bookmarks and social bookmarking. The presence of MP3 attachments as part of the RSS data spawned Podcasting.
RSS is now at that point where it's moving from a tech toy to a web workhorse. As a FirstClass administrator you've got a ton of relevant content at your site that you want to get out to your community. Having a web site is the anchor for this, but providing RSS feeds gives you the ability to draw those who need the data to your site.
The technical: How does FirstClass "do" RSS?
As a FirstClass administrator, you know that FirstClass content (messages, documents, conferences, calendars, etc.) can be displayed on the web using the Internet Services (IS) module. Objects are put in a publicly accessible place like the user's Web Publishing folder (formerly the Home Page Folder) or the WWW folder and are converted by IS to HTML using templates – the template set used affects how the object looks on the web. Our RSS implementation works pretty much the same way – a container is rendered through IS to "look" like an RSS feed by using a special template set.
There are some differences at the detail level between how the RSS feature works versus standard web content. The most important of these is that RSS is generated using a new template technology we call "plugin template sets". In the past, a template set was a large collection of complex files designed to display all possible FirstClass objects as part of a user interface. The plugin template set has fewer, simpler templates designed to display a particular object in a particular way. In the case of RSS, this means presenting a FirstClass container as an RSS feed – a simple list of titles, summaries and links.
There are three ways to create an RSS feed using FirstClass 8.3, listed here from simplest to most complex:
Use Web Publishing. The simplest way to create an RSS feed is to use the Web Publishing feature of FirstClass 8.3 to create a Blog or Podcast. Both of these objects, in addition to being part of your personal web site, automatically put an RSS feed URL in places where those coming to your site can see them. For example, if a user with an RSS-aware browser visits your Blog, their browser will tell them by means of an extra control that this Blog has an RSS feed. In Firefox this appears in the bottom right corner ...
 ... and allows them to subscribe to your RSS feed. The browser offers this extra control because for every FirstClass Blog we generate some HTML telling the browser "there is an RSS feed here".
For users with older browsers, a FirstClass Blog also automatically generates an RSS feed link at the bottom of the page (behind the graphic
 ), which the user can copy to their favourite RSS feed reader software. Use a Web Publishing object on your main site. A natural extension of the method described above is to use the same type of object, but put a link to it on your main web site. The user who "owns" the Blog still uses Web Publishing to manage and maintain it, but there is a link to it on the main web site to pull visitors there. For admins who would like the Blog to appear to be more integrated with the main site, they can simply make an alias to the Blog and put that alias in the main web site folder. Again the user who maintains the Blog works in her own area, and any reference to ~username disappears from the URLs, making the Blog appear to be more "official".
Use an existing Conference. The most complex option to set up, this can still be a handy thing for an administrator who wants to use an existing FirstClass object as the basis for an RSS feed. The bad news part is that the non-Web Publishing template sets do not automatically generate RSS feeds for public containers – you'll need to add the little RSS boxes to your web site (
 ,  , ,) yourself.An RSS feed can be generated for any FirstClass container object (folder, conference, etc.) which is visible on the web, by adding the following template override parameter to the URL:
/?Plugin=RSS&Leaves
For example, if the URL to the news conference on your web site was http://www.my_site.com/News , then the URL to the RSS feed for that conference would be http://www.my_site.com/News/?Plugin=RSS&Leaves .
Users who want to display this feed in their browser toolbars can do so easily on some browsers, while others don't support this technology quite yet. In the meantime, you can install a feed reader to pick up your RSS feeds. With a feed reader, you simply assign the URL, give it a name, and you have a feed.
For more information about how to subscribe to an RSS feed, read these instructions about how to subscribe to a FirstClass news feed using the different browsers.
Usually, sites that offer an RSS feed will put a little icon on their main web page to show that they have one. This is a good way to promote the existence of a feed. If your main page is a FirstClass document, all you need to do to direct users to your RSS feed is:
1 Paste in your preferred RSS image.
2 Highlight the image in the editor, right-click, and choose "Make Link".
3 Enter the RSS feed URL (in our example, this would be http://www.my_site.com/News/?Plugin=RSS&Leaves ).
If your main page is in HTML, you'll need a little HTML snippet (and an image in your Images folder) to make this appear. From our example, this would be:
<a href="http://www.my_site.com/News?Plugin=RSS&Leaves"><img src="http://www.my_site.com/images/RSSlogo.gif"></a>
If you were the administrator of "www.my_site.com" and you followed the directions above, you would now have a simple RSS feed of your News conference on your main web page. If someone subscribed to it, they would see something like this in their RSS reader:
 Clicking "Read more" launches their browser and loads the requested article using the web templates you use at your site. This is pretty good, but you might notice that the summaries are a bit sparse. This is because a standard conference listing does not contain any richer detail than the Subject, and for performance reasons the RSS templates will not open a message to peek inside. To get richer summaries, you'll need to add a Preview column to the conference. This feature was new in 8.1 and allows the first paragraph or so of a message to display in the list view; the RSS templates will use this information if present. Rather than discuss activating a Preview column here, I will refer you to Julie Oke's excellent article on the subject, located on FCOL in:
Conferences > Peer to Peer Support > FirstClass Admins > Admin Series New & Old > What's New for 8.1 > Custom Columns
The section of the document you are interested in is called "Adding a preview column". Once you've added that to your News conference, the RSS subscribers will see something like:
 Some ideas: What can you do with RSS and FirstClass today?
The section above gives a nuts and bolts description of turning RSS on for your site, but it doesn't really answer the question "What can I do with this?". The simple but powerful nature of RSS means that I can't answer that question in detail, so instead I'll present some ideas of things I've tried which might get your creative juices flowing:
Give your site a news feed. Just like in the example above, a conference which represents the main news channel for your site makes it easier for your community to track what's happening at your site, instead of visiting once and forgetting about it. A school might turn this over to the staff that creates printed newsletters as a way of getting timely news out, like "Tigers make regional volleyball finals!" or "Exams start next week". A business might give the marketing department control, making this a channel for customers to see the latest product announcements or events.
Give your site a variety of feeds. School closures, class cancellations, today's specials, new releases, road closures – any situation where your customers currently come hunt for frequently updated information is an excellent candidate for an RSS feed.
Make a personal feed. Put a conference with a feed in your Web Publishing folder. A teacher could use this as a homework or class event notifier – kind of an online agenda. How about a thought-of-the-day feed for an executive or a travel log from someone on a 'round-the-world voyage? These are like special purpose broadcasts, reaching those interested in what you have to say.
Share and publish your bookmarks. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us have been around for a while now, allowing groups interested in sharing web resources to have a place to store their bookmarks. Using the web publishing features of FirstClass, you can already publish bookmarks folders to your web site for use by you and your colleagues. With the RSS capabilities of FirstClass 8.3, you can now make these bookmarks "live" in
your browser, making your favorite web resources available to you no matter where you are browsing from. If you add a Live Bookmark in Firefox using Manage Bookmarks > File > New Live Bookmark, you can get these to appear directly in your browser's shortcut bar.
These are my bookmarks on the web:
 These are my bookmarks as Live Bookmarks in Firefox: (http://www.user.firstclass.com/~terry/Bookmarks/?Plugin=RSS&Leaves)
 Flatten or filter with a saved search. FirstClass 8.1 introduced the feature of saved searches, described by Julie Oke in an excellent article, located on FCOL in:
Conferences > Peer to Peer Support > FirstClass Admins > Admin Series New & Old > What's New for 8.1 > Odds & Sods
The section of the document you are interested in is called "Search, live hit lists, and saved searches". At any rate, since a saved search returns a list of items, it can be used to generate an RSS feed. There are two general cases where this is useful:
• flattening multiple containers into a single feed
An example of this would be a social bookmarking area you might have set up as a hierarchy of folders full of bookmarks. To turn these into a single RSS feed for use on your browser toolbar:
1 Define a saved search that finds the bookmarks in all subfolders.
2 Put an RSS feed URL on your site that refers to the search document with "/Plugin=RSS&Leaves" added to the end.
• filtering a large feed into a more targeted one.
Imagine that your company has a conference representing your main site feed, which gets postings from marketing, sales, and product management. In general you want customers to see all of this information, but you have a class of customers who need only product bulletins from this busy feed. Set up a canned search that returns only product bulletins and refer to this document as a separate feed on your web site.
Careful when using searches to generate an RSS feed, since a search can be a slow operation. We recommend using searches that do not look inside the text body and which have limited subcontainer depth set in order to ensure good performance.
Example
The FirstClass Newsletter was recently made into an RSS feed called FirstClass News for Admins. You can view it here.
 Share your ideasIf you are using FirstClass and RSS feeds in a way that is not mentioned in this article, please tell us about it by emailing us at technewsmail@firstclass.com.
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