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Assignment #2

Due Wednesday, June 18

40 Points

In this assignment, you will use RSS to author and publish your own RSS 2.0 feed using the UNH computer systems. You must satisfy the following guidelines and requirements:

  1. The content of your feed is up to you, but it should reflect some sort of coherent theme throughout.
  2. You must use version 2.0 of RSS to author your feed. Some of the more common confusions regarding RSS 2.0 are addressed on the FAQ page, so check there first if you have questions or problems.
  3. The channel should have at least a title, a description, a link, a copyright, a last build date, a documentation link, a managing editor, a webmaster and a language. List yourself as the managing editor and me as the webmaster.
  4. The channel link must lead to http://www.cs.unh.edu/cit/403/work/homepages.html.
  5. The feed should contain at least three items (more is better).
  6. Each item should have at least a title, a description, a link, an author and a globally unique identifier.
  7. The item links may lead anywhere you wish, but the link destination must be appropriate to the item content.
  8. The feed must be published in a file named myfeed.xml using your cisunix account and the pubpages server. In other words, the URL of your feed should be http://pubpages.unh.edu/~xyz/myfeed.xml, where xyz is your UNH user name. When you click the “Feed” link beside your name on the Homepages page, the RSS code for your link should appear in your browser window.
  9. Test your feed using the Firefox Web browser. Ultimately, people will subscribe to your feed using an RSS reader, but RSS readers present some problems when testing a feed. That’s why you should use Firefox instead. Be sure to check the links.
  10. Add another item to the feed (for a minimum of four total) and ensure that the new item eventually appears in your reader.
  11. Once your feed is published, ensure that it validates without errors (recommendations are okay) when you enter its URL into the Feed Validator at http://feedvalidator.org/. Fix any errors as necessary. If you change one of your existing feed items, remember to change the globally unique identifier for that item to ensure that your reader recognizes the item as changed.
  12. Do not change your published feed for 72 hours following the submission deadline to allow time for grading.

In addition to how well you have satisfied the above minimum requirements, I will consider the technical accuracy of your markup and the extent and nature of your content when grading this assignment.

It is not required, but I would recommend that before beginning this assignment you reproduce one of the RSS sample feeds that appear in the notes on RSS in a text file, publish this file and test the results by validating the feed and subscribing to it with an RSS reader of your choice. This will allow you to practice the mechanics of the process before you actually begin writing and publishing your own RSS code. Note that you may get some warnings when validating these simple feeds, but no errors.

If you need assistance with the publishing process, refer to the Publishing Tutorial.