What is a Backend? 

Up front we show you the content stored on UserLand's servers through pages of HTML, like the one you're looking at right now. But much of the same content is available in XML formats, RSS and OPML, and through the protocols XML-RPC and SOAP. That's the back end. UserLand is active in the definition and development of all these formats and protocols.

You can build applications on this content flow. We want to work with other developers. If you develop an interesting application, please post a message on our discussion group.

RSS -- Really Simple Syndication 

On this site you'll find the specs for RSS 2.0, 0.92 and UserLand's 0.91 spec (Netscape also did one).

There's also a directory of applications that support RSS.

Weblogs.Com backend 

The core file in the backend of Weblogs.Com is changes.xml.

A directory of protocols and formats for Weblogs.Com is here.

Scripting News in XML 

The main news page on UserLand.Com is Scripting News.

The XML version of this page is here. It's in <scriptingNews> format, an early syndication format that merged with RSS in version 0.91.

9/16/2001: Scripting News is available in OPML.

9/15/2002: Scripting News is available in RSS .20.

Global Shortcuts 

One of the features of our CMS is that it will substitute "double quoted phrases" with text that's stored in the Global Shortcuts table.

If you want to make your server compatible with ours, read this XML file every hour and if it changed, copy it into your database. It's pretty straightforward to do, and obviously works with content management systems other than UserLand's.