University Computer Help Desk

Overview of Help Desk and Alerts RSS feeds

The University Computer Help Desk provides RSS feeds, which include important information and alerts. This article explains the functionality of RSS feeds and how to use of them.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a web-based news feed format designed for sharing headlines. The University Computer Help Desk offers several RSS feeds for important information on the Help Desk website, as well as for important Outages & Alerts that affect Illinois State University.

RSS Feeds Offered

Using RSS Feeds on Your Website

Website administrators can display RSS-driven headlines on their websites. To do so, you must use either a server-side scripting language (i.e. PHP, ASP, etc.) or a client-side scripting language (i.e. JavaScript, Java, etc.) to program the desired functionality. In other words, the Help Desk RSS feeds are available for anyone who wants to use them, but you need to engineer your own solutions to parse the XML file and display its contents.

Examples of use

Currently, the Outages & Alerts RSS feed is being used by the following University websites:

Technical Information

The following technical information may assist you in engineering your own RSS solution. The RSS feeds provided on the Help Desk website and the Outages & Alerts website use the following:

  • XML 1.0 specification, as published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
  • RSS 2.0 standard
  • Atom 1.0 namespace

Website administrators who need assistance engineering RSS solutions  may contact Institutional Web Support (IWSS) at (309)438-8835 and websupport@ilstu.edu.

More Information

 

Article Information

  • Article ID: 1001
  • Last Review: Nov 10, 2008
  • Type: Article

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