This is for the techies in the crowd, I'm looking for some fairly technical advice.
I'm working on a project to provide a shared platform for a widespread online group of communities. XML in RSS/Atom formats is great, but we need just a bit more functionality. We'd like to filter newsfeed items based on interest themes, age, geography, etc., and produce software that will create the XML feeds and aggregators to read them (standalone and web-based).
The project is to make it simple for non-technical people to implement enhanced XML feeds, and simple aggregators that will filter the news based on preferences set.
The additions we're looking at adding are: Interest theme (about 30-50 categories); audience (mostly age-based, adult or juvenile); geography/location (preferably using an ISO standard); calendaring; and news type (e.g. news, blog, announcement, etc.)
Currently, the best option we've come up with is to use RSS v2.0 and Atom v0.3 with namespace declarations. We're still looking at the best ways of defining how to have software read lists of Interest themes that would be updated annually or so (maybe an XSD, if RSS / Atom supports that).
So my main question is, are we reinventing the wheel to add extensions like this, or is there an existing way for RSS-type feeds to be customized on a variety of platforms and software languages?
Anyone interested in the history of this project can start
here, and then
here, and
here too.
Any advice is appreciated. This could potential turn into a rather big endeavor, with nearly 200,000 potential web matches, according to Google. (Current forecast is for several hundred syndication feeds using this spec within the first year.)
Thanks,
Kelly McKiernan
LENNI (LEGO Enthusiast News Network Initiative)
General