RSS Feed

[Gizzmoe]

Originally Posted by gdogghenrikson

1. what is this supposed to do

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29:

"RSS is widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries' headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files. (See podcasting, vodcasting, broadcatching, photocasting, picturecasting, screencasting, Vloging, and MP3 blogs.) In mid 2000, use of RSS spread to many major news organizations, including Reuters, CNN, and the BBC, until under various usage agreements, providers allow other websites to incorporate their "syndicated" headline or headline-and-short-summary feeds. RSS is now used for many purposes, including marketing, bug-reports, or any other activity involving periodic updates or publications.

A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled webpages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major Web sites, as well as many smaller ones.

Client-side readers and aggregators are typically constructed as standalone programs or extensions to existing programs like web browsers. Such programs are available for various operating systems. See list of news aggregators.

Web-based feed readers and news aggregators require no software installation and make the user's "feeds" available on any computer with Web access. Some aggregators syndicate (combine) RSS feeds into new feeds, e.g. take all football related items from several sports feeds and provide a new football feed. There are also search engines for content published via RSS feeds like Feedster, Blogdigger or Plazoo.

On Web pages, RSS feeds are typically linked with an orange rectangle optionally with the letters XML or RSS."

2. dont get your hopes up, I gave on idea for a spell checker and I was shot down.

Yeah, but not by Neal! He simply has to check a few important things if he wants to implement a spell checker:

- Is it good?

- Is it stable (no memory leaks or something)?

- What are the memory and CPU requirements?

- What happens in a "worst-case scenario", when 50 people use the spell checker at the same time? Can the server fully handle it or will our members start to complain about slow forum access time or does the server/phpbb/the spell checker crash?

It can be all quite complicated and time consuming to test.