Steve Smith, host of your TQA Weekly, explains how to program your own RSS feed for your web-site.
Episode #2-49 released on September 2, 2012
We live in a society where people are becoming more and more used to having any new events or information accessible at a swipe of a screen on a mobile device, or accessible from any internet enabled device. The power of RSS is understated and it's uses are virtually unlimited. We use RSS for many types of feeds containing the latest news and information, media, pod casts, etc... Creating one is exceedingly more easy than creating a simple web-page, and as a result, we expect any serious web-site designer to be able to create RSS feeds for web-sites themselves. Furthermore, you can use RSS feeds in a multitude of ways including providing content for mobile applications.
The process of creating an RSS feed begins by the identifying it as such.
<rss version="2.0">
Then we proceed to creating the channel information.
<channel>
<title>the title</title>
<description>The description</description>
<link>Link to the page containing the web-based content.</link>
After this we create the an item by item unit for providing the information.
<item>
<title>article title</title>
<link>http://pagetoarticle</link>
<description><![CDATA[ The description or short story of an article.]]></description>
<guid>http://pagetoarticle</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 20 Aug 2012 4:05:41 -0500</pubDate>
</item>
You may, also, opt for a description without the CDATA tag, view below, however insertion of HTML tags will break the XML for the RSS feed, so keep that in mind.
<description>The description or short story of an article.</description>
After this you close the RSS feed with the following.
</channel>
</rss>
And that is it. The whole feed is completed. You should save it with a RSS extension as to say to any software or server to process this file as a RSS file.
The completed RSS feed with one item looks like this.
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>the title</title>
<description>The description</description>
<link>Link to the page containing the web-based content.</link>
<item>
<title>article title</title>
<link>http://pagetoarticle</link>
<description><![CDATA[ The description or short story of an article.]]></description>
<guid>http://pagetoarticle</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 20 Aug 2012 4:05:41 -0500</pubDate>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
Next week, I'll be explain how to turn off plugins in your browser, whether you run the latest Chrome, Fire Fox, Safari, Opera, or Internet Explorer, and explain why this may actually save your computer one day soon!
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Host : Steve Smith | Music : Jonny Lee Hart | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Productions