Create an RSS Feed Using

rsscreate81 — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:40:44 +0000

If you are into an online business you should definitely equip yourself with at least the basic knowledge about RSS feeds. It has become important during the present competitive times that we live in to learn in detail about aspects such as RSS feed search, how to add RSS feed and so on and so forth. Whatever may be the business you are into RSS feeds should form one of the important tools that you use to market your services or products. Whether it is to add RSS feed on a web site or simply gain knowledge on these aspects you can find literally hundreds of online sources which can help you out.

RSS was in fact originally developed in order to allow news services to actually syndicate their content by displaying article summaries, links and headlines on other websites. RSS feeds are possible because of the use of dedicated software known as news aggregators.

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.

Please note that in these examples I have used square brackets instead of angled brackets.

[?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?]

An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

[channel]
[title]The Widget news feed[/title]
[description]The latest news on widgets[/description]
[link]http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[image]
[title]Widget News[/title]
[url>http://www.widget.com/widget.gif[/url]
[link>http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[/image]

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.

[title]Which is the best Widget to?[/title]
[description]In this article we discuss the release of several new widgets, but which is the best widget.[/description]
[pubDate]Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:50 GMT[/pubDate]
[link]http://www.widget.com/the-best-widgets.html[/link]
[/item]

But how can you display other feeds on your site? Simple….

CARP (CACHING RSS PARSER) RSS feeds on your webpages Free and Paid Version Available geckotribe.com/rss/carp/

FREE RSS TO JAVASCRIPT SERVICE Converts any RSS feed into a Javascript code to paste on your site.

RSSlib – this library allows you to add RSS content to your site (PHP or ASP).

This is just a quick primer on how RSS works but it will help you to understand just how useful it is to you and to your content. Have fun with it.

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial on create an rss feed using.