Content Syndication with RSS

Name

mod_slash

Synopsis

Slash is the software originally written to run the popular technology news site, Slashdot. It has spread quite far lately, and now hundreds of sites use it for their content management system. Slash’s unique features do not fit into the core RSS 1.0 specification, so Rael Dornfest and Chris Nandor wrote this module. The features are most easily understood after a look at a Slash-based site, so go over to http://www.slashdot.org to see what’s happening.

Namespace

The namespace prefix is slash:, and the identifying URI is http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/. Hence:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" 
         xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"
         xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
>

Elements

All the mod_slash elements are subelements of item. They are all mandatory.

slash:section

The title of the section in which the article appears.

slash:department

The title of the department in which the article appears (in most Slash sites, this title is a joke).

slash:comments

The number of comments attached to an article.

slash:hit_parade

A comma-separated list of the number of comments displayable at each karma threshold (this will make sense to you if you look at a Slash-based site). There should be seven figures, matching karma thresholds of -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Example

Example 7-17. An item element containing mod_slash

<item rdf:about="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/01/164242"> <title>LotR Two Towers Trailer Online</title> ...