As part of developing the MishMash website, can RSS feeds be used to link information from various university web pages? Here is a blog post summarising some of what I have learned about this “classic” web standard.

The basics

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has been a cornerstone of web content distribution for over two decades. It was developed by Netscape in the late 1990s as a solution to content discovery problems and evolved through several versions (0.90, 0.91, 0.92, and 2.0) before reaching widespread adoption.

The RSS format allows websites to publish a standardised feed of their content, enabling users to subscribe and receive updates without visiting each site individually. This was revolutionary before social media algorithms dominated content distribution.

How RSS Works

Technically speaking, an RSS feed is an XML document containing:

  • Channel metadata (title, description, link)
  • Individual items (posts with title, description, link, publish date)
  • Optional elements (author, categories, enclosures for podcasts)

RSS readers and aggregators parse these feeds, allowing users to consume content from multiple sources in one place. Here is an example from Wikipedia:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
 <title>RSS Title</title>
 <description>This is an example of an RSS feed</description>
 <link>http://www.example.com/main.html</link>
 <copyright>2020 Example.com All rights reserved</copyright>
 <lastBuildDate>Mon, 6 Sep 2010 00:01:00 +0000</lastBuildDate>
 <pubDate>Sun, 6 Sep 2009 16:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
 <ttl>1800</ttl>

 <item>
  <title>Example entry</title>
  <description>Here is some text containing an interesting description.</description>
  <link>http://www.example.com/blog/post/1</link>
  <guid isPermaLink="false">7bd204c6-1655-4c27-aeee-53f933c5395f</guid>
  <pubDate>Sun, 6 Sep 2009 16:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
 </item>

</channel>
</rss>

RSS Today

I have been using an RSS reader for as long as I can remember. Nowadays, I use Feedly to be informed about new content from a long list of channels I follow. Call me old-fashioned, but it is a very straightforward and efficient way of keepin on top of things independent of any social media channel.

This blog is built with Hugo, which includes a built-in RSS feed. You can check this link for my blog’s RSS feed, which you can then subscribe to in your favourite RSS reader.

The University of Oslo’s website is heavily reliant on RSS feeds. All news and events folders have their own RSS feeds, which makes it possible to publish content in one location and feed it elsewhere. For example, RITMO’s Events page is a collection of underlying folders in the RITMO structure, and it also feeds to the Department of Musicology’s event list. That means if we publish something on the RITMO website, it will automatically appear in the department as well.

RSS and MishMash.no

As we are currently setting up the new MishMash website, we need to figure out a smart way of connecting information from the (very) many partners in our network. The website is currently built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub, which means we are detached from institutional content management systems. That is good in that it gives us freedom and flexibility. But it is challenging because we need to set up our own solutions for feeding content.

For now, we have set up RSS-based content retrieval for the MishMash partner event listing. You can also subscribe to our RSS-based news feed. This was much easier to set up than I had thought, and I look forward to exploring it more in the time ahead.

This post was checked with Grammarly.