RSS and Service Status

RSS 1.0 is a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format. RSS is an XML application, conforms to the W3C's RDF Specification and is extensible via XML-namespace and/or RDF based modularization.

-- RDF Site Summary (RSS) 1.0 Specification (http://purl.org/rss/1.0/spec)

The Service Status module, first proposed in May 2002, extends RSS 1.0 to include elements which allow the description of the status and current availability of services and servers. The Service Status module specifications can be found at http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/servicestatus/.

Basic data, such as whether a server is responding, can be generated automatically (for example by the ceridwen.com Service Status Servlet), whereas explanatory text might be the result of further processing or direct human input. Given a map of service dependencies, it is possible to calculate combined service status with both the input and output conforming to the Service Status RSS specification.

The most obvious application for the syndication of status information is status web pages. Service Status RSS can easily be aggregated, combined, and transformed to HTML, WML, and plain text.

XSLT stylesheets

Because the Service Status RSS feed (RSS-SS) is XML it can be transformed using XSLT. There are several XSLT stylesheets available from this site.

Further reading

Ben Hammersley, Content Syndication with RSS, 2003