XML idea

Wouldn't it be great if there was a news feed of prison news that you could put on your site? Unlike the computer generated feeds from MoreOver.com, what we'd all like to see is news headlines edited by activists. Mainstream news reports are good, but it would be great to see articles written by organizations as well.

The Prison Policy Initiative is proposing to organize and set up a computer system called an XML aggregator to do this.

This is also an organizing issue. Many organizations have only a limited net-presence, and PrisonSucks.com site is the only one that we know of with an XML feed. The process of setting this up would include helping this organizations get their material online.

Here we am thinking of combining data from:

• the prison thinktanks
• the prisoner law offices
• the prison reform groups
• the prison news lists (ie the news on prisonact-l) into one feed that can be put on any site making everything timely and more useful. This might help us all promote our work better.

Technically speaking, this is not a new concept. The code already exists and just needs to be assembled. Volunteer programmers and/or a donation to hire programmers would make this project happen sooner. Alternatively, if you would like to volunteer your coding or graphics skills to help small prison organizations get online let us know and we'll try and hook people up.

The biggest thing holding this project back from proceeding at internet speed is lack of programming help. So help if you can. Write to the address at the bottom of the page.

Features of project:

• Create system to poll prison sites with RSS feeds and enter into database.
• Create system to allow registered users to input a link directly into the feed. (Perhaps limit to one a day as a way to help groups with low tech sites but also as a way to encouraging them to upgrade to automatic systems?)
• Sort 10 newest items, and output as RSS and javascript feeds.
• Assist sites in installing NewsPro or other systems that would make general updating easier as well as XMLization.
• Allow member sites to specify only a subset of source organizations to provide data to their feed.
• For sites with cgi-bin and general ssi ability create an easy to install script to pull the right feed and convert it to html for inclusion via ssi. (Few sites have exec ssi or the ability to run cron jobs.) Perhaps we can also create a script to trigger the updating scripts on the installed sites several times a day? The easier we can make this, this more sites will use it. IMO, avoiding javascript is the best for compatibility. But maybe there is a better solution entirely?

We were looking at RSSFetcher or GetXML and tieing it into DBMan. If you have a better ideas -- or have some time to spend on it -- get in touch! We'll do this as soon as we can, but it might take a year the way we are going....