BBC Backstage, A9 and HiT Syndicaat

Recently, the BBC started an interesting initiative called backstage (http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/).

According to their web site, the motto is Build what you want using BBC content. So, we tried a little experiment. We aggregated and stored all the provided BBC RSS feeds into a unique RSS feed (note: platform support provided by the HiT Syndicaat server). Our goal was to provide a demo environment to show the performance and resource utilization of our RSS server.

There is an interesting twist to our experiment, namely RSS search support. HiT Syndicaat supports searches and also supports the A9 search format.

So, we registered the BBC RSS feed collection to the A9 server and now you can run your queries on BCC content (starting May 18, 2005) within A9.

To do that follow these instructions:

Go to http://a9.com

Login (or Register if necessary)

Go to http://a9.com/-/search/moreColumns.jsp

In the Search Columns edit box enter: RSS BBC. There, you will find our collection of all RSS BBC feeds coalesced into one feed and provided by our server. Add that column and run your searches.

Alternatively, if you want to run your searches directly from our server, use the following URL:

http://www.hitsyndicaat.com:8080/synd/_channels/ALL+BBC

followed by URL parameters as in the following examples:

http://www.hitsyndicaat.com:8080/synd/ALL+BBC?daterange=-m15 to return all RSS items in the last 15 minuts

http://www.hitsyndicaat.com:8080/synd/ALL+BBC?texttitle=Paris to return all RSS items containing Paris in the title

http://www.hitsyndicaat.com:8080/synd/ALL+BBC?description=Paris to return all RSS items containing Paris in the description

http://www.hitsyndicaat.com:8080/synd/ALL+BBC?daterange=-d3%20to%20-d2 to return all RSS items saved three days ago.

Please, refer to HiT Syndicaat documentation for further instructions on search syntax.