Atom and RSS feeds

Silva can serve Atom and RSS feeds of its documents. Feeds can be turned on in the Settings screen, a subscreen of the Properties screen, for folders and publications. Figure 1 shows the setting.

Fig. 1. Atom and RSS feed configuration

Feeds are made available at a specific URL:

• For an Atom feed, append ‘/atom.xml’ to the container URL.
• For a RSS feed, append ‘/rss.xml’ to the container URL.

Example: http://infrae.com/products/silva/docs/editor/atom.xml

This URL can publicized or linked in the public presentation of your site. Also the site Manager can add a link tag to the HTML so that browsers know that the feed exists (for Firefox users a feed icon will appear in the brower’s location bar).

Silva’s feeds have the following characteristics:

• Only Silva Documents are referenced.
• Only published documents appear in the feed.
• A feed only shows documents from the current level. Folders, publications, and their contents are skipped.
• The order of the articles is based on their creation date.
• The article metadata in the feed includes the subject, creator, creation date, and a link URL.

It’s important to realize that publishing feeds can have an impact on your site’s performance. Some feed readers return every hour to update a feed. If there are hundreds of visitors subscribed to the feed, this can create a lot of traffic.