This blog is for, by, and about PIER Systems employees. PIER is the now widely adopted standard for stakeholder communications and is used throughout the world, and we're the people who create it and keep it running. We will offer insight and news whenever we can.RSS and PIER
Acronyms galore! We get asked a LOT if PIER supports RSS feeds. The answer is “Yes,” but allow me to break it down.First order of business, what is RSS? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. I’m hesitant to make an analogy here, since we saw how much flak Ted Stevens got for his Trucks and Tubes ditty, but RSS is like a little personal radio station on the internet. It just takes some content you have and breaks it down into a series of items, then formats them in a machine readable language (XML) with a universal format that RSS “Readers” can understand. Then someone’s “reader” turns it back into something people understand.
So there’s three parts:
- The content - this is the RSS feed your blog (and this blog) make.
- XML Feed - This is the machine language the feed is written in to be sent over the internet tubes.
- The reader - This is what a person uses to read your feed.
Usually when people ask if PIER works with RSS they mean one of two things:
- Can PIER understand other site’s RSS feeds and present them on my PIER site in a meaningful way?
- Can PIER make RSS feeds that other sites can understand and present in a meaningful way?
The answer to both is, of course, yes. To get PIER to understand another site’s RSS feeds and present them in a meaningful way, see the XML Feeds section of the help site.To use the feeds PIER makes on another site, you have a couple options:
- The free rss-to-javascript.com (Example)
- Self-host a PHP solution (Example)
Of course, neither of these options are supported by PIER Systems, Inc., but that needn’t stop you from using either of them.
I hope this helped clear some things up!
Posted by Lach Mullen on 10.Dec.07
