Archaeology Data Service
ADS ONLINE - ISSUE 14 - Virtual Communities - ISSN 1368-0560 | Front Page | Contents

Hitting the headlines: ADS launches newsfeed service

Over the last few months ADS staff have been working on a new and simple tool allowing web sites to share short items of information. Based on a standard called 'RSS' this open source tool makes it easy to share news items and headlines. Jen Mitcham explains how this new system works and why it is useful.

'RSS' technology is being widely adopted to share information on the Internet. The ADS has now set up two newsfeeds that will be useful to organisations interested in our work: a newsfeed based on new collections, and a newsfeed for news and events.

A newsfeed is a simple XML file containing a list of headlines with links to the pages where further information can be found. The advantage is that other web masters can include this in their own web sites. As we update our XML files with information on new collections, projects or workshops, this news will be syndicated across to anyone who is using our newsfeed. That way, remote web sites are kept up to date without repeated manual data entry.

This service will be of use to anyone maintaining a web site, especially those in academic libraries and university departments. The feed is transferred by including a short script within the HTML of any web page. Thus every time we launch a new collection or event, the host web site is updated with news of that new collection or recently announced event.

Although completely invisible, this technology is deployed on the ADS home page. The Latest News section draws from our main newsfeed. As we change the items in the XML file, a script on the web server automatically updates the front page.

Jen Mitcham
jlm10@york.ac.uk

For more information about RSS visit the ADS website at http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/rsscode.html.

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