You know how it is. You've been writing away on your cool little blog for weeks, baring your soul in your words and your body on your webcam. You're the perfect model of a blogging webcam whore. But you're still not getting any readership. What you need to do is put your clothes back on, clean your black little emo glasses, leave blogger alone for just a moment and create an RSS feed.
What the hell is an RSS feed?
Like most computer nerdy things, an RSS feed is something that sounds very complicated and technical, but which boils down to something very simple indeed. If you can cope with the HTML knowledge it takes to use E2, you can make an RSS feed with no trouble. People who wear pocket protectors and understand terms like XML and document object model will tell you that RSS is a system for describing data with tags that abide by XML well-formedness rules. They might even pause to mention that RSS started off as an RDF document, or that there all sorts of conflicting standards and rules to obey. They'd be right, but boring. Ignore them, and you'll do just fine.
What having an RSS feed really means is that your content can be easily linked to and manipulated by other people. This is a good thing - imagine all the extra traffic you'll get when your angst ridden blog entries are posted around the world! Woohoo! An RSS feed sits in a little file somewhere on your web server, and contains all the details people need to play with your content, and it's this file we're going to create now.
Creating your first ever RSS feed
First of all, RSS is written with XML, which is a bit like HTML - in fact it's the other way around: HTML follows the rules laid out by XML. We'll be using things called tags, which are just words in angled brackets, like <this>. Every tag must have a closing tag, too, which look like </this>. Some tags are opened and closed all at once, <like this />, but we'll worry about this when we need to.
RSS feeds are created in plain text, just like e2 writeups. This means you need to use a plain text editor, like Notepad or vi or even Word, just as long as you remember to save with all the formatting removed, in plain text. The first two lines we need tells the manipulating thing - usually a web browser or script of some kind - just what it's got it's hands on:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
Basically, the first line says,
hey! I'm an XML document, so you better make sure I'm formed properly!, and the second proclaims
I'm also an RSS file - I hope you know what you're doing!. It's really, really important that
RSS feeds have these lines first.
Next, you need to divide your content up into channels. Think of a channel as a subject or category. Your website might have multiple subjects, so you can provide multiple channels in your RSS feed to reflect this. Those nerdy guys think of everything! Channels are created with the <channel> ... </channel> tag, like this:
<channel>
... stuff here in a moment ...
</channel>
Easy, eh? Now, lets add some information about your channel. We'll be using the
<title>,
<description> and
<link> tags for this bit. Lets say your blog has a section about your pet dog,
Fluffly Wuffles. You'll need to add the following lines just after the
<channel> tag:
<title>My dog Fluffy Wuffles</title>
<description>Fluffy Wuffles is my dog, and he's sooo cute! Photos and stool samples!</description>
<link>http://www.mywebsite.com/fluffywuffles/</link>
...And that's it, that's a channel all done. All you have to do now is add some items to the channel. All channels must have at least one item, and no more than fifteen. You add an item using the same
<title>,
<description> and
<link> tags as above, but wrap each one in a special
<item> tag. Let's see what items we have about
Fluffy Wuffles:
<item>
<title>The day I got my Fluffy Wuffles</title>
<description>Hear the story of how I got my adorable little doggy.</description>
<link>http://www.mywebsite.com/blog.html#1</link>
</item>
<item>
<title>Fluffy Wuffles is poorly</title>
<description>Poor Fluffy Wuffles has gone to the vet!</description>
<link>http://www.mywebsite.com/blog.html#5</link>
</item>
<item>
<title>Fluffly Wuffles mauls a crook</title>
<description>It was so exciting! My dog caught a crook!</description>
<link>http://www.mywebsite.com/blog.html#23</link>
</item>
Once you've got all your <item>'s inside the <channel> tag, you need to close the file properly. You do this with one line that matches the <rss> tag we opened right at the beginning:
</rss>
The final step is to save your file. Give it a nice
lowercase name, with no spaces in it, to make sure it'll work on the web (I'd avoid
punctuation, too!) and save it with the
.xml extension. Let's call ours
fluffy.xml. Once it's saved, you can then
upload it to your web space. Your entire file should look like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>My dog Fluffy Wuffles</title>
<description>Fluffy Wuffles is my dog, and he's sooo cute! Photos and stool samples!</description>
<link>http://www.mywebsite.com/fluffywuffles/</link>
<item>
<title>The day I got my Fluffy Wuffles</title>
<description>Hear the story of how I got my adorable little doggy.</description>
<link>http://www.mywebsite.com/blog.html#1</link>
</item>
<item>
<title>Fluffy Wuffles is poorly</title>
<description>Poor Fluffy Wuffles has gone to the vet!</description>
<link>http://www.mywebsite.com/blog.html#5</link>
</item>
<item>
<title>Fluffly Wuffles mauls a crook</title>
<description>It was so exciting! My dog caught a crook!</description>
<link>http://www.mywebsite.com/blog.html#23</link>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
That's it. That's a genuine, valid, perfectly formed RSS feed. If you want to check your own feed, you can use an RSS validation service, like the one hosted at http://feeds.archive.org/validator/. There are all sort of extra things you can add into your feeds if you need to, like other tags and attributes. If you fancy getting more involved, then there's some URLs at the end of this writeup which should help.
Getting syndicated
Having an RSS feed is all very well and good, but it doesn't really do anything just sitting there. The simplest way of giving it some attention is to just link to it: <a href="fluffy.xml">get my RSS feed!</a> will work just fine. If you're using RSS to syndicate a blog, then share your feed's URL with other blog writers, or submit it to RSS directories and search engines. Sites like http://weblogs.com and http://blo.gs also let you submit your RSS URL for increased coverage.
Useful links and biography
-
RSS: Your Gateway To News & Blog Content article
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175281
-
Making An RSS Feed
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175271
-
RSS feed validator
http://feeds.archive.org/validator/
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RSS 2 Specification
http://backend.userland.com/rss
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How To Get Your Web Site Content Syndicated
http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/How_To_Get_Your_Web_Site_Content_Syndicated.htm
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Weblogs dot com
http://weblogs.com