An RSS news feed can be used to communicate with your
target audience. It is an ideal means of notifying people of new
content on your website without the need for them to keep on
visiting your site. You can send newsletters to your readership
without having to use email and risk being accused of spamming.
You will be comfortable in the knowledge that people who request
your feed are actually interested in it because they have
actively subscribed to it. This article will explain just how to
create your own RSS news feed.
There are a couple of ways to create an RSS file, you can use an
editor designed for the purpose or you can create a file using a
simple text editor. The latter will require you to learn some
XML whilst the former will do the hard part for you. First off I
will describe an RSS file, there are several versions and I will
be showing you version 2.0, the latest RSS version.
An RSS file looks just like an HTML file except it has different
tags and the files end in .rss or .xml rather than .html. The
file is made up of header information and item information, the
item information contains the actual news items.
The first section of the file contains the header information.
This states that the file is XML and which version, the encoding
used and the version of RSS that you are using. This part of the
file is mandatory. Next up is the channel tag, this encloses the
whole of the rest of the file. This is followed by a title,
description and link which explain the what the feed is about
and what website it is associated with. The final part of the
header is the optional image information. If you use this the
software that is used to parse or read your file can display a
small picture such as a logo.
The Widget news feedThe latest news on widgets
http://www.widget.com/
Widget Newshttp://www.widget.com/widget.gif
http://www.widget.com/
The body of the file is made up of the news items. Each news
item is enclosed in the item tag and comprises of a title, a
description and a published date. The date needs to be in the
format shown in the example below.
Which is the best Widget to?In this article we discuss the release of several
new widgets, but which is the best widget.Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:50 GMT
http://www.widget.com/the-best-widgets.html
You can have as many items in the feed as you like but many
webmasters just show the 10 most recent items to keep the
bandwidth usage down and also so not to overwhelm the end user
with too many items.
Finally the file is ended with the closing channel tag and a
closing RSS tag.
I have covered the basic tags to create an RSS file, there are
other tags that can be used and these are explained in the RSS 2.0
specification.
Once you have created your file you will need to verify it is
ok, to do this upload the file to your server and then go to
this validator to
validate the file. Your file is now ready. Now anyone can
subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to
your RSS file.
That is the basics covered. I will be covering other areas in
future articles as there is far too much information to fit into
a single article.