Since its inception OSS Watch has been using RSS newsfeeds to provide up-to-date information about open source software for UK higher and further education. These newsfeeds have been made available in the RSS 1.0 format.

The newsfeed data has been maintained via a web form that interacted with a database used to store the content of the newsfeed. A Perl script was then used to produce RSS 1.0 from that database.

Recently, Computing Services at the University of Oxford (OSS Watch’s host institution) has developed an institutional newsfeed system (called OXITEMS). The primary development work on OXITEMS was carried forward by Barry Cornelius (who divides his time between Information Services and OSS Watch within Computing Services). This is now being used by some departments and colleges at the University. One of its key features is that it provides three levels of authorisation:

• an administrator within a department/college is able to create newsfeeds for that department/college and assign a manager for each newsfeed;
• a manager looks after the day-to-day maintenance of a newsfeed; in particular, he/she is responsible for assigning authors;
• authors are able to add new items and edit existing items of a newsfeed.

The code of this new system has been written in PHP and, behind the scenes, it uses a PostgreSQL server.The PHP scripts produce XML which is then transformed into HTML using XSL. OXITEMS is able to deliver newsfeeds in the RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 formats.

On Wednesday 5th April, OSS Watch started to use OXITEMS for its newsfeeds. The process of migrating to OXITEMS was made easier through the use of tools provided by Computing Services to move the data from the old system to OXITEMS. For a seamless migration, all the URLs previously advertised by OSS Watch needed to be maintained and this was achieved using a .htaccess file containing appropriate rewrite rules to deliver information from OXITEMS rather than the old system.

We hope you enjoy the new RSS service.