RSS Circumvents Spam

Again, this process is spam-proof! That's the main reason why I'm an RSS evangelist.

Only the feed publisher can designate what information gets into the feed, and the only information the subscriber pulls down is what the publisher put there. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you're not giving your e-mail address to anyone, they can't send you stuff you don't want.

This is a huge deal, especially for people who currently publish or subscribe to e-mail announcement services. Spam has become so pervasive that up to 38% of all opt-in e-mail messages (stuff that people have specifically asked to receive) get blocked by spam filters. My colleague Steve Outing wrote an excellent Editor & Publisher article on this problem last August.

Why RSS is Better Than E-mail Announcements

Just about everyone who publishes content online has some sort of e-mail announcement list. I do, too. Still, RSS is a great complement to e-mail announcements because it doesn't clutter people's in-boxes, it's easier to manage for recipients who get a lot of news online, it's spam-proof, and it's easier to manage than an e-mail list.

While not a lot of people know about RSS right now, it's getting popular quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next couple of years RSS becomes as widely known and used as the Web and e-mail.

RSS from a Content-Provider's Perspective

From a technical perspective, an RSS feed is a small data file (typically under 10KB) that a site (or subsection of a site, whatever) makes available, which lists the most recent items at that site. The file is in a simple dialect of XML; the file is meant to be autogenerated from the rest of the site -- say, from the site's content-management system, or by having a little program that just reads part of an HTML page (like the site's main page) and summarizes it in RSS.

By notifying people interested in your content, as well as Web sites that collect and package content announcements (called aggregators), you are "feeding" them your content – hence the term RSS feed.

refbase and RSS

refbase offers to convert almost[1] any query into a RSS feed which can be subscribed to using your favorite news reader.

[1] (regarding RSS support in refbase-0.8.0: you can't subscribe to RSS feeds whose queries include user-specific fields. This will hopefully be added in a future release.)

With refbase you can:

• use automatically created RSS queries
• create your own RSS queries

Benefits of RSS

So, what is the benefit for the usage within refbase?

• you will be immediatly informed about changes in refbase, e.g.:
  • when new records are added
  • records are changed in any way
  • a wanted keyword was added to the database and so on

In fact, any query can be turned into a RSS feed (besides user specific data).

That's why, RSS feeds are the optimal tool to be up to date with your database in any way!

Using prepared RSS queries

• If your are using an internet browser with RSS capability, you should be informed about available RSS queries, when you visit the start page.

RSS button in Firefox

• • Firefox:
    • you should see in the lower right corner of the browser window a symbol, which inform you about available RSS feeds
    • click on this icon to see a list of these feeds
    • now you should right-click on the desired entry and select copy link adress
    • with this link adress you can establish a new RSS feed in your newsreader

RSS link for query results

• If you executed a query (e.g. Simple Search, Advanced Search or SQL Search), you will find in the header (above the query results) a link called RSS (or track in refbase-0.8.0).
  • in the same way, as mentioned above
    • right-click on the RSS link and copy the link adress
    • with this link adress you can establish a new RSS feed in your newsreader

Creating your own RSS queries

You can create new and probably very specific RSS feeds (queries) by using the SQL search page.

This will be demonstrated by creating a RSS feed that contains all records that were added (or edited) today. This may seem tricky since, obviously, the date in the query would change every day.

Here's how to do it:

The MySQL query language offers a CURDATE() function that will insert the current date (like '2005-04-13') and which can be used within the WHERE clause of a SQL query. If you display the SQL search page of your refbase database and paste the following query into the SQL Query form:

SELECT author, title, year, publication, volume, pages FROM refs WHERE modified_date = CURDATE()
ORDER BY author, year DESC

the database will display all records that were edited today.

Here's an appropriate news feed for the refbase Demo Database:

http://demo.refbase.net/rss.php?where=modified_date%20%3D%20CURDATE%28%29&showRows=10

The resulting RSS feed will always display all those records of the refbase Demo Database that were edited during the current day. (If you don't see any records for this feed, chances are high that there were no changes to any records during this day -- of course, you could login and make some changes yourself... :)

To adopt this feed URL to your own database, simply replace http://demo.refbase.net with the URL to your own refbase base directory. You may also want to adopt the value of the showRows parameter which specifies how many records will be displayed. You can then use the resulting URL as feed URL when subscribing to this feed in your news reader.

Btw, the same could be done for records that were added to the database using the created_date field instead:

http://demo.refbase.net/rss.php?where=created_date%20%3D%20CURDATE%28%29&showRows=10