How to make your own RSS feed

Published on Feb 21, 2007   //  Development
4

RSS ButtonWell if you read the blog regularly you will see I was attempting to make an RSS feed for our main site (which is not dynamic). We are testing this to see is there is any SEO advantage to having a feed on our main site. Also our regular customers can subscribe to the feed and if we add anything to the site they can be updated.

So after looking at various automated versions I decided to just do it myself.

Step 1
Open any basic text editor. I am going to use notepad.

Step 2
Define the document type:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″ ?>
 <rss version=”0.91″>

Step 3
Define your RSS feed settings:

 <channel>
 <title>BlueFur.com</title>
 <link>http://www.bluefur.com</link>
 <description>BlueFur.com – Canada Web Hosting </description>
 <language>en-us</language>

Step 4
Create an item:

<item>
<category>Main Page</category>
<title>Welcome to BlueFur.com</title>
 <link>http://www.bluefur.com</link>
 <description>
 BlueFur.com is a leader in Canadian web services.
</description>
</item>

Step 5
Close the RSS feed:

 </channel>
 </rss>

Step 6
Save the file with a .rss extension and upload it. You should now be able to view it.

You can view our progress of building it here. I recommend that if you have a site you consider building a simple RSS to see how it works. It is a lot easier then I thought it was going to be.

4 Comments to “How to make your own RSS feed”

  • Dr. Cossack
    February 21, 2007 8:42 pm

    Personally, I’d highly recommend selecting the version 2.0 of the RSS standard instead of the much older 0.91. Version 2.0 is almost completely backward compatible, so all you need to do here is change the second line of your feed to reflect this. This allows you to benefit from any of the most recent additions to the RSS 2.0 standard that you could happen to be interested in.

    The news on my site are also available through a RSS feed that I built myself. It was surpringly easy to get up and running.

  • Matt
    February 21, 2007 9:07 pm

    Yes, I also think that RSS 2.0 would be a much better choice…

    Don’t forget to add the “Deal of the Month” to the Feed, since then people can get updated on what kinda deals BlueFur is offering…

  • Hostimal
    February 26, 2007 2:51 pm

    If you make any typing error with XML tags you can have problems, specially for small feeds you can check it from IE or some other web browser.

  • Do You Use RSS? | John Chow dot Com
    October 7, 2007 10:02 am

    [...] have nothing to do to enable RSS as it is already a full feature built in. Follow along with this RSS Tutorial for those sites that are not [...]

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