probably some of you already noticed the little orange "xml" button at the bottom of the antville sidebar. this is what it looks like:

if you cannot spot it, you probably modified your site's page layout before we introduced the button. in this case you can add the macro yourself:

<% site.xmlbutton %>

simply put it at the desired place in a skin and voilà!

the button links to a document that contains all the stories that are visible on the main page of a site but without any layout information (except for what was put into the stories).

this document is in a special xml format called rss (which means rdf site summary, and in turn, rdf means resource description framework).

actually, you do not need to know much more about these pretty technical terms. however, if you are interested in some background information, there is a good collection of articles and links at the o'reilly rss devcenter.

generally, for sites rss documents provide a standard way to distribute their core data (in antville these are site stories stripped from any layout) among various publishing channels.

because of the rather strict format, the rss documents then can be read and processed by other people and other tools. such tools include e.g. radio userland (win/mac), knewsticker (linux) or this javascript rss viewer.

using rss feeds bloggers easily can exchange and syndicate their site's content with each other or news services like my netscape or news is free.