SIndication is a free service offered to any website interested in getting XML feeds of our news and articles for your website. For those of you interested in our Javascript version - details of this will appear here shortly.
What's XML?
XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a flexible markup language that Sports Interactive uses to offer feeds of its contet. We use a standardised format of XML, known as RSS. This format splits up the text contained in an XML file into easily extractable elements - for example, the title element contains the title of a particular article. For example, if you run a fansite and want the latest news, you could parse our RSS feed and take the title and link elements. Parsing the RSS feed can be achieved using, for example, PHP - a search on 'RSS Parsing' on any major search engine should yield some useful tips for integrating feeds into your pages. For reference, we use RSS 2.0 - details about this standard can be found here.
Reference guide
- lastBuildDate - the date and time when this feed was last rebuilt and cached on our server. The date and time is formatted according to RFC 822.
- ttl - how often the feed in question is rebuilt. 'ttl' stands for 'Time To Live', and the number presents the number of minutes between rebuilds; for our main headline feeds, this is set to 30, while our category-specific feeds are set to 120.
Desktop RSS feeds?
There are various headline readers out there, many of them free. A quick search on any major search engine for "RSS News Readers" should point you in the right direction, but here's a couple to get you started:- FeedReader - Freeware newsfeed reader for Windows. Currently in Production/Stable status at Sourceforge. Licensed under GPL.
- Wildgrape NewsDesk - Freeware newsfeed reader for Windows, based on Microsoft's .NET Framework. Requires Internet Explorer 5.01+ to be installed on your system to run.
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