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How do you get started with setting up RSS? First you need to understand what RSS is used for. RSS can be used anytime you
want to provide information to users. What you choose to provide is completely up to you: a monthly newsletter, the daily comic, a deal of the day,
your latest blog entry, or a recent webcast from your radio show.
Once you come up with an idea of what you want to send, you have to figure out how to do it. There are several programs available that will write an
RSS feed for you, the most popular being FeedForAll. This
program works fine for creating feeds, they offer a free trial version, and is available for both Windows and Mac. But if you're like me, you don't use
Dreamweaver, you write your webpages by hand, so why use a special editor for something as simple as an RSS feed?
RSS feeds, like HTML and XML, are based on SGML, so they look similar. An RSS feed is simply a special type of XML file. Not sure what XML is?
There are a few resources
available, so do some searching. The most important thing to remember is, most applications are
much pickier about RSS feeds than HTML. I have found the easiest way to learn about RSS is to find websites that offer RSS, and look at their feeds. If you use Firefox or Opera, it's
fairly easy to tell when a site offers RSS, by the orange or blue icon that shows up. If you're still using IE (for shame!), look for the orange RSS or XML icons that people like
to put on their site to show how cool they are by having RSS. Although most browsers will display an RSS feed, download the file, then open it up in your favorite text editor, you'll
get a better idea of what you're in for.
When looking for RSS feeds to study, remember there are different standards out there. Some feeds are relatively simplistic, like our Newsletter Feed.
Others are more complex, such as the feed from popular geek site Slashdot. We use the RSS 2.0 standard for our feeds,
as it is widely supported, and provides all the features we need. Almost all version of RSS are widely supported, so when deciding which standard to go with, look at the different features each one offers.
Things to Remember
Hopefully the information above will get you started on your path to RSS satisfaction, but there are a few things to keep in mind:
- Validate Your Feeds: This is especially important for those of us who write our own feeds. There are several websites, including FeedValidator.org, that will
tell you if you have any problems with your feeds.
- Content-Type: In addition to the actually pages, web servers send a lot of information to browsers in the form of HTTP headers. One of these headers, Content-Type, tells the browser what type of file is being sent: is it
a plain text document, a web page, a JPG graphic, etc. If the server sends the wrong information, then the browser won't know what to do with your XML file. You can use FeedValidator.org
again to check that the correct Content-Type is being sent; it should be "text/xml", "application/rss+xml", or "application/atom+xml", depending on which RSS standard you use. If the wrong type is being sent, contact your hosting company,
and ask them to change the "Mime-Type" to "text/xml" for files named ".rss".
- Be Creative: RSS is one of the hottest growing trends on the internet right now, so make sure you're at the forefront. As with all new technologies, there are possibilities that no one has explored before. Have fun, be creative,
and don't be afraid to experiment.
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