RSS Feed
RSS Feeds are way of publishing lists on the web, such as the latest posts to a blog, or audio files of a podcast. RSS originally meant RDF Site Summary, and was popularized by Dave Winer and the blogging communtiy as Really Simple Syndication, is now said to stand for Rich Site Summary. RSS is designed to make it easy for software, like a "pod catcher" or a feed reader to automatically collect and download information from websites that a user has "subscribed" to. Feeds can be useful to write scripts that use public websites as services to request, for instance, the latest images added to Flickr with a given tag, or to search a set of news sites for their last headlines.
Some examples of public feeds
- Flickr json api key? "woman" "man"
- BBC News "education & family" "business"
- Internet Archive
- YouTube
- Vimeo ("simple api") ... is a search feed advanced only?
- Open Clip Art "woman" "man"
- 4chan
- A custom Tumblr feed creator (tumblr itself doesn't offer rss feeds)
- uncovering a Facebook feed
- getting at a Twitter rss feed
Finding feeds embedded in an HTML page
If you view the "Recent Changes" page of Wikipedia, and view the source you will find something like the following:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title=""Special:RecentChanges" Atom feed" href="/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom" />
Similarly, viewing the source of an Article's change history reveals a feed.