the RSS 2.0 specification

It doesn't happen often, but I spent some time this week writing a piece of software, an RSS feed application for the Northwest Digital Archives database. This feed is embedded in my blog (see the right pane). I've gotten some help on this from the NWDA tech assistant Jason, who wrote a section of code to manage date conversions and has provided some other help. I'm performing the programming in Visual Basic .NET/ASP.NET, using the IXIASOFT TEXTML .NET API. The feed is created by extracting information on the most recently created five documents in the database. The program loads both document content (title, description, link) and document properties (for pubDate) information.

Working with this development has led me to look carefully at the RSS 2.0 specification. As noted, I needed help in formatting the date-time information for the document creation dates; the specification requires these dates to be formatted according to RFC 822. One thing that's enjoyable about this development is that it's a team effort. For example, for the category data (under each item), I will be communicating with the project archivists on the appropriate terms; one possibility would be the NWDA browsing terms, but there are other headings associated with repository documents as well. (Two other great things about this work: it's fast...and it's free! (except for our pay))

Despite the OSS revolution, I'm still coding in Visual Basic and will probably continue to do so. Three people in my shop are attending code4lib in February, but I'm giving it a miss.