My own RSS feed technology

[Apparrel]

I hope I dont sound crazy. But my question is this, I would like to develop my own RSS feed technology, including the reader and aggregator. I believe it could come in handy for a future project.

But I dont know the bolts and nuts that would help me achieve this task.

I hope there would be someone here who can point me in the right direction.

I just need to understand the indept of the technology and see how I can craft it from the scratch.

Any help would be well appreciated. :wave:

[mendhak]

A reader is an aggregator. Not sure what you mean now - do you want to come up with your own schema that's similar to RSS but that caters entirely to your own data?

[Apparrel]

Thanks for ur reply Mendhak.

I would like to implement feeds on sites that already dont have feeds, which am not neccessarily the webmaster.

So I thought if I should write my own feed generators (if there is anything like that) which the sites could implement.

Then I can write my own aggregator and reader for a site am in charge of, which would then publish the contents of the sites that use my feed generators and those that use other third party feed generators.

I hope you understand what am trying to say, its not like am very experienced in feeds, but I would like someone to point me in the right direction, something that could quickly get me up and running.

What I mean by feed generator = An application that could generate feeds on the site it is implemented to alert my reader and aggregator that the site has been updated given me the channel and updated content.

And when I mean right direction it could be a book that really explains how to achieve the task explained above.

Once again thank you. :wave:

[mendhak]

Yeah you can do that, but it'll be messy.

Using C#? VB.NET? You'd start first by choosing a site, doing an HttpWebRequest on it and then parsing the HTML that you get back. Each site will have different HTML, you'll need to be able to recognize patterns in the HTML and use that to determine what's a title and what's a description and what the URL is, etc.

Further, you'll need a service or a scheduled task that regularly checks the web page for updates and compares with previous versions so that you can have up-to-date records.

Once you've got all the data out, you can then generate the RSS XML and present it as a feed!

Note that you'll have to write 'custom' code for each new site that you start aggregating.