RSS over Multiple Servers/Systems

[quinnmal]

Hey all. I just started a new project with RSS and would really
appreciate any advice/help/knowledge. I have had no experience with
RSS prior to this, however I'm fluent in Javascript and other
languages, just have never done anything RSS related before.

My department has a department website that's broken down into several
sections, lets say
1. Publications
2. Projects
3. Research

So on each of those webpages (Publications, Projects, Research) we
want an RSS feed for that section. As in on the Publications.html
page, only the publications rss feed is displayed.

Now where the RSS feed gets it information from is more tricky.

Each project in our department has their own website/own server/own
publications and own Project-specific RSS feed.

I'm trying to figure out a way so that I can have a system so that
people can make their own rss on their own websites, (incase they
wanted their own rss feed on their site) but I then want the
Department Webpages above to pull the rss feeds from these other xml
files.

so if I have 2 projects: say Project Mongoose and Project Zebra. Each
project is on their own website/server (www.mongoose.com and www.zebra.com).
I want to find a way so that there can be a publications.xml,
projects.xml, research.xml on each of those servers and then I want a
way so when I go to www.company.com/publications it displays the rss
information from BOTH the publications.xml file on Project Mongoose's
server AND the publications.xml file from the Project Zebra file.

I'm sorry for the long post and confusion, but I would seriously
appreciate any help. So to break it down, I need to figure out a way
to:
1. Have instructions for people on their own servers to create RSS
files (pubs.xml, projects.xml, research.xml)
2. I need to somehow write an RSS feed for the Webpages that will have
a static list of servers and will Pull the 3 rss feeds from each
listed server.
3. Display the feeds on their respective pages. (/publications.html
would show the feeds from both publications.xml files)

If anyone has ANY ideas on how to accomplish this, please let me know.
Thank you so much.

 

[Andy Dingley]

If anyone has ANY ideas on how to accomplish this, please let me know.

I've posted a bunch about this to the other web authoring groups
(c.i.w.a.h, a.h and a.w.w) in the past. Try searches for "RSS" and
"aggregation".

Basically it should be a layered solution. Make narrow RSS feeds from
everything and everywhere, then use RSS aggregators (a well-known
technology) to glue them together and filter as needed. This also
works if the RSS input feeds are external - they're just RSS after
all.

To make aggregation useful, then add generous categorization metadata
to the published feeds (Dublin Core etc) and also use aggregators that
can filter on its basis. As it's only within a closed system, you
don't even have much problem with semantics -- a category of "foo" or
"subjet-code-1234" doesn't need to be recognisable to the outside
world, just known by your two layers (generation and aggregation).

For efficiency within a large system then you can tightly couple the
two layers such that they share a database of items, rather than
publishing the feed all the way out to an XML document on a web
server, then re-loading and re-parsing it. Keep them _logically_
separate though.