By now, everyone is probably familiar with the RSS icon…

image

RSS has a couple definitions… originally called RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary, eventually everyone started calling it “Really Simple Syndication”.  If you really want to get technical you can read all the latest specifications at the RSS Advisory board site here: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification

RSS feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favorite websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

Also very useful when you want to add fresh content to your own website by pulling from another site’s RSS feed and displaying the information to your viewers!  Updated content without the hassle of writing it.

Generally there are two types of RSS Feed: Internal or External.

Implementation:

Internal RSS Feed Web Part:

Any RSS Feed link (xml) which is hosted inside a company intranet is categorized as a RSS Feed internal link. SharePoint servers’ security can be configured in two ways: Kerberos or NTLM.

If Kerberos authentication in configured (enabled) on your SharePoint server then you can use an out of the box RSSViewer Web Part to render an RSS feed coming from the internal RSS feed link. To enable Kerberos authentication on SharePoint 2010, follow the Microsoft whitepaper which you can download here: Configuring Kerberos Authentication for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products

If you are using NTLM authentication and you try to configure the RSS view webpart with an internal RSS feed link, it will throw an error like this:

“The RSS Web Part does not support authenticated feeds.”

Because this is fairly common to want, several RSS Reader WebParts have shown up on CodePlex, as well as third party components.

http://wssrssreader.codeplex.com/site/search?query=rss%20reader%20sharepoint

Or otherwise, if your web site’s security permits, then give anonymous access to the underlying list/library.

External RSS Feed Web Part:

Any RSS feed link which is hosted on the internet (e.g. ieDaddy Post Feed is called an External RSS Feed. Normally External RSS feed links don’t work as-is on Company Intranet sites, since they use proxy servers to connect to the internet. In that case use the following link to enable an external RSS feed in your environment.  Easy enough to get around by changing the web.config of your web app with the following lines of XML:

   <system.net>
      <defaultProxy>
         <proxy usesystemdefault="false" proxyaddress="http://proxyname" bypassonlocal="true" />
      </defaultProxy>
   </system.net>

There are some scenarios where you need to embed RSS feed code inside a page/page layout /master page and outside a web part zone. In that case, the RSS viewer OOB web part will not work. The RSSaggregator tag is not recognizable outside a web part zone. In that case, use a Data View Web Part. Create a Data Source of type “Server side scripts” and connect that to an XML RSS feed link. The you can copy the Data View Web Part code and place it at an appropriate place in your page/page layout/master page.

Additionally, there are several JavaScript renditions of an RSS reader out there that you can literally copy and paste into our friendly CEWP.