How to Build an RSS Feed
RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary, is a tool that can be used by almost any webmaster to provide constantly updating information about their site and its contents. Many browsers, computers and even smartphones can be set to read and subscribe to RSS feeds and there are many online tools that enable users to subscribe to the feeds and have the feeds delivered to one place.
Because they are dynamic RSS feeds are popular and can improve your site's visibility and usability. RSS feeds are also very easy to set up and start running.
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Instructions
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Open a text editor such as Notepad (Windows) or TextWrangler (Mac). Do not use a word processor -- word processors add end-of-line and other invisible formatting characters that will adversely affect your script's performance.
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Type the following lines into your new document:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>These lines identify the feed version and begin the information about your site.
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Add your site information as follows substituting your own info where applicable:
<title>My Website</title>
<link>http://www.mywebsite.com/</link>
<description>Visit my site regularly and often!</description>As you can see because this is an XML file it bears a strong resemblance to HTML.
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Add the following information for each feed "item" you wish to enable:
<item>
<title>Entry Title</title>
<link>Link to the entry</link>
<guid>http://example.com/item/123</guid>
<pubDate>Thurs, 29 Sept 2011 16:23:41 GMT</pubDate>
<description>[CDATA[ This is the description. ]]</description>
</item>Make sure you keep the format as shown, including the date. When you have all of the items you wish to enter add a </channel> and </rss> to the end of the file, then upload it to your Web server. This feed can now be submitted to feed engines such as FeedBurner and feedly.
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Tips & Warnings
The example here is static; it will not change as your site changes unless you update it manually. In order to have a dynamically changing feed you will need to program it using PHP, Python or another scripting language.
