Dashboards of data are the way of the future. If there are metrics worth tracking, there’s a dashboard to visualize it. One of the original dashboards designed to save everyone time is the really simple syndication (RSS) feed. RSS is not a dashboard by nature, but an organization of content, usually XML files, to distribute snippets of text, headlines, and latest news from various sources. Instead of you having to manually visit multiple websites and read their articles, an RSS feed can collect the top stories and present them to you in your custom RSS reader. For this to work, you need a server to act as the RSS aggregator, which tracks what content you’ve seen so you can always get new and up-to-date results. Although RSS feeds are dwindling in popularity, their innate architecture is still useful to understand and apply in more creative and useful ways.
In this chapter, you’ll build your own RSS feed reader to access and process XML. Then you’ll create your own RSS aggregator, which will read from multiple feeds and provide up-to-date and relevant content on demand. By the end, you’ll have a fully functioning RSS feed aggregator that can list data on your command-line or web client.