4 RSS Feed

The news feed must be available as an (HTTP) URL that can be fetched over the Internet. The URL can point to any type of page, as long as it is retrievable via HTTP. You may make your news content available using a static or dynamic (PHP, ASP, Perl, etc) page. The URL must always remain the same.

Some example (fictitious) URLs:

• http://www.doc.govt.nz/doc-news.rdf

• http://www.ssc.govt.nz/news/news.rss

The content within your feed must always contain the news items for the last 7 days (at a minimum). In this way, news items will never be lost, even if there is a service disruption. If there was no news content for this period of time, the aggregator will expect to find an "empty" feed. This does not mean a file of zero bytes, but rather a feed with no <items> in it.

An alternative solution is to always provide the 10 (for example) latest items in your feed. Even if no content was added recently, your feed will always contain the most recent news items.

On fetching a feed, the aggregator will save new items and update items that were previously already published. If an item was previously published, it will be updated in the aggregator, taking the version present in the feed as the authoritative version. The only exception to this rule is if the aggregator editor had edited a given item. In this instance, the item will no longer consider the source feed as authoritative (and will therefore no longer synchronise that given item with the source feed).