Skip Menu

RSS feed formatting for website administrators

The Virginia Tech News and Campus Notices feeds have four entries in the <item> tag that can be parsed and translated — the title, the link, the description, and the release date (pubDate). The description is either the lead paragraph of the news story or the full campus notice. The output on a web page is dependent on how the data is parsed and formatted into HTML. An example:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Agriculture</title>
<link>http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/feeds/agriculture.html</link>
<description></description>
<language>en</language>
<pubDate>Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<managingEditor></managingEditor> <webMaster></webMaster>
<docs>http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html</docs>
<item>
<title>Growers Academy helps farmers, growers break new ground</title>
<link>http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2010/05/2010-411.html</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[
The new Growers Academy offered by VT EarthWorks helps people in the region break into farming.
]]> </description>
<pubDate>Tue, 18 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2010/05/2010-411.html</guid>
<enclosure url="http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2010/05/images/M_10411rogers-jpg.jpg" length="5783" type="image/jpeg" />
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
</xml>

The production addresses for the feeds is http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/. The feeds are available for people to use to include the information in an active web page or via RSS feed-reading programs.

There are also available RSS headline feeds targeted to each college and other units (listed above), based on how each story is tagged when it is entered in the CMS. Visit the feeds page to see the complete list.

• For more information about implementing Virginia Tech RSS feeds on your website, please contact our webmaster.