How Do I Create An RSS Feed?

Its Mailbag Wednesday...

I asks: Can you help and direct me to where I can find information on how to create XML feeds and buttons? I want to implement this for my customers but as it is all new to me I am finding it hard to know where to start.

Answer: Hey I, glad to see you're jumping on board!

It's important to realize that an XML (or RSS - which is essentially the same thing) feed is nothing more than a text file. You may find that they typically have an .xml or .rss file extension, but its still just a text file - it can be opened in any text editor, such as Notepad.

That being said, it's not just a regular text file, but a text file containing XML, which is a special syntax that essentially allows a regular text file to act as a mini-database, if you will. As in the case of an RSS feed, that mini-database contains news articles, including the articles' headline, date of publication, an article summary, and a link to the full article. You can think of those elements as 'fields' in the database, and each individual article as a 'record' in the database.

Since all RSS feeds are essentially text files (a universal file format) and contain article data with these same 'fields' of information, RSS newsreaders can easily read an RSS feed from any source, which makes it a very powerful, and universal way of managing information.

In other words, if you look at the text within an RSS feed from two different sites (or a hundred different sites), you'll see that they essentially all look the same - the 'database' structure is the same, but the article information contained in the database is different.

How is an RSS feed generated, and updated? Well, if you understand RSS syntax, you can open Notepad (or Apple's SimpleText) and create one yourself, if you wish. However, most people would rather pull out their eyelashes than learn the syntax necessary to do it manually!

The most common way of automatically generating and updating an RSS feed (but certainly not the only way) is to start a blog. Most blogging tools/services take care of generating and updating the feed each time you post a new entry to your blog. All you have to do is tell your blogging tool/service the URL where you wanted the generated feed uploaded to. The result might look something like:

http://www.mydomain.com/feed.rss

This becomes the link to your 'channel'.

To make an XML button where visitors can subscribe to your feed/channel (as you see to the right of the page on my site), you simply point an image or text hyperlink to the URL of the generated feed.

Depending on the newsreader, there are various ways for a visitor to subscribe to your feed, or tell their newsreader to track your feed. But once they have, the newsreader application will regularly load the data within the text file at your feed's URL to see if it contains any updated information since the last time it checked. If it has been updated, the newsreader will alert the user that new items are available.

That's it!