I was looking into the details of rss today. Until now I know that RSS is used for sharing your blogs and a lot of other things. However not all was aligned and I was not getting an end to end idea of what exactly this is and how it works. So here it is from what I learnt today.
RSS is a xml reprensentation of your data in a typical format. There is no specified standard that RSS follows however RSS 1.0 version used W3C RCD standard.

So lets say you have a plain web page or any kind of document. If you manually convert that document or web page into an XML document with specified syntax, you have the RSS ready. Also there are RSSCreators which are available in the market which will help you generate RSS out of your non-rss content. If you dont want any RSSCreator it is also possible to create our own RSS manually as well. RSS Validators are also available which will validate the generated RSS feed.

Once you have a rss feed, anybody can take this feed and see the contents. Oh what a big deal. They can very well see the contents of my web page as well. Rite :-). However the good part of RSS is that, somebody who is interested in your content, can subscribe to your rss feed. We shall discuss methods of subscription later in this article.
Once somebody subscribes the rss feed, whenever you update the content for this feed, the subscriber will see the updated content automatically and they need not re-visit your site every one hour to check whether there is any update. So this is more of a push technology in that respect where the data will come to you instead of you going to data.

The automatic update of RSS feeds is thanks to RSS aggregators. RSS aggregators are programs which will watch out for the feeds that you subscribed and send you the updated content for those feed.

Coming back to subscriptions, so if you see any RSS content, it will have this icon <icon here> which says, subscribe to this feed. If you click on that it will ask you to choose on your favourite RSS readers where it can subscribe you. Also there is an e-mail subscription option which will send an e-mail everytime any content is updated on that rss feed.

RSS Discovery is finding out feed from the content. Let’s say your web page has n RSS feeds. Using RSS Discovery, you can get the exact xml corresponding to rss which you could subscribe to. Most of the online aggregators these days have the RSS discovery mechanism in built so that if you provide them the URL, it will fetch the appropriate RSS and you can select the RSS to subscribe.
I found an interesting article about RSS Discovery concepts here.

While browsing through RSS contents, I also came across a term OPML again related to RSS. OPML stands for Outline processor markup language ( I dont know where this markup language business is to extend :-)). OPML file lists all the RSS feeds into one. This helps in importing/exporting rss feeds acrosss aggregators. Also it is used by aggregators themselves to exchange feeds. Online OPML managers are also available to manage your OPML files.

7-7-7 for me was a day at Bar camp. The camp was hosted at Persistent systems. Being a part of the organizers, I planned to reach there at around 9. Although early showers in the morning delayed my plans and was there at around 9:30. Things had already started moving. The registrations had begun and the campers (participants) were enjoying early morning “Poha” with “chai”. It was good to see people praising your campus and canteen and everything.

The sessions started at 10:30. It was good to see that all the 3 tracks were almost packed before 10. I went and attended throughtworks presentation on “Fractuals and Complexity”. I really wondered before the session what is this guy suppose to talk about since I did not have any head or tail of the topic. But that was one thing that attracted me to attend the session and I enjoyed it. The theme behind the session that everything that nature designs is not complexity but rather simplicity. The trick is to figure out the applied algorithm which could may be iterative or repetive and they could really create complex structures. It was good to see people and companies exploring such mathematical and different ideas.

I also heard that TVGuide.in session which was running in parallel to this track was also an innovative concept and the teams had fun interacting with the speaker.

The next presentation by Adaitya Thatte about microsoft’s silverlight product was also informative. Meanwhile I also had discussions regarding the new co-operative IT concept with Ajay. This was again and interesting thing, which co-incidentently I was also thinking about sometimes before.

It was lunch time by then and we had a delicious lunch in Vinod and Priyanka’s company.

There was yet again an interesting session regarding “How to open start-ups in US, UK and India” by Rohas from Techturis. Rohas talked about some really interesting tricks and points which only a lawyer can think and analyze.

We had freeman talking about “Open source education” after that. Freeman discussed about the open source communities initiatives in reaching to masses with quality training through. I found this concept also catchy and would definitely like to contribute to the same. I also had a talk with Puja from marketwala.com meanwhile where she talked about how marketwala operates and interesting revenue models.

Anand from persistent also presented his idea of BLogger which was really an application in itself. Seems like he is triggering the semantic web concept and taking it to production :-).

Had a good time with the organizers too. All of them Kiran, Jatinder, Atul, Rohit11 (yes this is what his name is and we had a good debate on this :-)) all of us had interesting discussions and information sharing.

I would say, Barcamppune3 was a hit…..Enjoyed the day.

Hey All,

The bar camp fever continues. Let us get wet with bubbling new technology discussions along with drizzling rains at persistent, pune.

The topics seems to be interesting and I am sure all of us will have fun as always.

See you there.