A major update to Sixent took place on Friday, January 22nd, which included two major new enhancements: Events and RSS feeds. This post describes only the new RSS features so be sure to also read my post on Sixent Events.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It's an alternative way to consume a website's content and is ideal for monitoring that website for updates without needing to constantly re-visit it.

Technically, it's a machine-readable document in a HTML-like format called XML. It's called a "feed" as it represents a stream of recent entries.

To make use of RSS, you need a "feed reader" which categorizes and displays many feeds in a usable format. A feed reader might come as software you install on your computer or mobile phone but it can also be an online service such as Google Reader.

One feed reader that I've been enjoying lately is Feedly - this is a reader which is built as an extension for the Firefox browser. Here is the Sixent Blog feed shown in Feedly:

Is It Safe?

One thing you'll notice about Sixent's implementation of RSS is that your regular username or password is not required to access a RSS feed that can include private content. To maximize compatibility with feed readers, Sixent RSS feeds containing private content are secured by a unique authorization token. Without it, only publicly-shared information will be included in the feed.

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The authorization token appears at the end of the RSS feed address, e.g. "http://..../rss?auth=123456". It is unique to your account and should not be shared.

If you believe someone might know your code, you can reset it at any time from My Account. If you reset this code, you will have to re-subscribe to your RSS feeds or manually update the "auth" value with your new code.

What Information is Offered as an RSS Feed?

Nearly any piece of information in Sixent could be rendered as an RSS feed. We will eventually include more feed types but have focused initially on content.

Here are the types of feeds that are available today:

• Content search (i.e. site-wide search)
• Content search in a single group
• Group page (including or excluding sub-pages)
• Comments on a single item
• Posts in a single discussion topic
• Comments on a single discussion topic reply

How Do I Find a Feed?

There are two main ways to find a RSS feed in Sixent:

1) For feeds related to content searches, simply conduct a search and the RSS feed option will appear next to the number of matching results. A site-wide content search is shown below.

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2) For feeds related to a group page, item or discussion topic, scan down the page or press "Share". You will see a new "RSS" option alongside the previous options available.

If the page or item is public, you will see both types of feeds. Use the public one if you plan to share the feed with someone or embed the feed within another site or Sixent group. Be sure to never share a private feed as it contains your feed authorization code.

 

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Sixent Feed Pod

Don't forget that you can subscribe to any RSS feed from any source by adding a "Feed Pod" to your dashboard or group pages.

To do so, select the "Add" or "Add Pod" button in the top-right of your pages. Make sure you're on the "General Pods" tab and click "Feed". You be shown configuration options for the pod where you can paste in any RSS feed URL you like. Note that you can also subscribe to "Atom" formatted feeds, an alternative to RSS.

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Coming Soon

We'll soon be adding feeds for other areas of Sixent, such as your Activity Stream. Please subscribe to this blog via its new RSS feed to stay updated.