RSS Feeds

I have pulled out this information from the lecture and explanded upon it further.

Here is a list of the rss feeds for Multimedia Studio 4 [ feed - note this feed only works in Safari under Tiger. ]

To use RSS feeds on pc and mac.

There are several free clients available to help you do this.

For the mac you can use either Feed [http://www.keeto.net/feed] under 10.3.X (Panther) or Use the feeds which come striaght from Safari in 10.4 (Tiger).
Under pc you can use Rss Reader [http://www.rssreader.com]
OR you can install the Wizz RSS reader extension plugin for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=News%20Reading&numpg=10&id=424 or
you can install the SAGE plugin for Firefox - http://sage.mozdev.org/ These will support both RSS and Atom feeds.

Builidng an rss feed is not too hard.
You can also collate your own rss aggregated feeds from multiple sources. If you are not comfortable doing this, the clients above can do it for you.

The way normal RSS aggregation works

starts with http:// just like a normal url, and between the various urls you can simply place an '&' to aggregate them. This can also be done inside the clients mentioned above, by creating groups of feeds. Some other clients have issues with hand made feeds links as they cannot validate them properly. This does not mean they dont work, but rather that the clients are too fussy :)

For example:
http://infenv-berry2.uqi.uq.edu.au/blojsom/blog/s4099445/?flavor=atom&http://infenv-berry2.uqi.uq.edu.au/blojsom/blog/s4099801/?flavor=atom

These urls were simply pulled from the blojsom.infenv.itee.uq.edu.au front page and in this case use the atom protocol rahter than rss2. It is up you which you use, just make sure your client supports it. There are not too many differences between rss2 and atom, that you need to be concerned about - a bit like htm and html.

For more details of the diferences look at: http://www.tbray.org/atom/RSS-and-Atom

Main point of the article is captured here:

"RSS 2.0 requires feed-level title, link, and description. RSS 2.0 does not require that any of the fields of individual items in a feed be present.

Atom 1.0 requires that both feeds and entries include a title (which may be empty), a unique identifier, and a last-updated timestamp." (taken from: http://www.tbray.org/atom/RSS-and-Atom )

The way Safari does it under Tiger

add 'feeds:' followed by the feedname 'multimediastudio4' with '&' as blog feed separaters.
Some RSS clients require a UUID number at the end to validate - in this case you may need to build the aggregated feed from inside that client.

for example:
feeds:multimediastudio4&infenv-berry2.uqi.uq.edu.au/blojsom/blog/s4072060/?flavor=atom&infenv-berry2.uqi.uq.edu.au/blojsom/blog/s4075130/?flavor=atom

This makes life allot easier for all of us to track progress and provide feedback.