In this video, I’m going to show you how to make an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a script that you can put on your website that other people can subscribe to so that they are notified every time your website is updated. RSS feeds are mainly used for blogs because they are updated so often and they are also the primary way of delivering podcasts and can also be submitted to the iTunes podcast directory.
I’m going to show you the xml code behind creating RSS feeds and then I’m going to show you an easy way to generate your own RSS feed using your free program called RSS Builder.
RSS feeds are created using xml code which is a mark-up language designed for encoding documents. If you want to follow along using the PC, you open up a notepad or open typepad if you have a Mac. We’ll begin with the same way that all xml scripts begin with the declaration that tells the version and encoding method of the document. Then we’re going to declare the RSS version that we are using. Well be using the most recent version which is 2.0. If you watched my HTML tutorial awhile back, you will notice that xml requires an opening and closing tag just like HTML does.
In between these tags is the Channel tag in which we’ll store information about this RSS channel that we’re creating. Now we can begin entering information about the channels such as the title of the feed, a link back to our main website, a description of the feed and the language that it sent. We’ll call each of these different tag nodes.
The next node is for an image for your feed, this can be a logo that you’ve created for the feed itself or just a logo from your website. It includes the title for the image, the web page that it links to, the location of the image on the web, and the width and height of the image. Everything that you have written up to this point will remain constant for your feed. If your feed ever updates, this part is always going to stay the same.
The next node is for the feed items. This is what changes, each time you update your website, you will add a nee item to the top of the list. Here is the breakdown of what an item consists of—the title of the item, the published date, a link to the item’s webpage, and the description of the changes. The description is contained in a piece of code called CDATA and it’s formatted like this. Now depending on the function of your feed, you can add other nodes to it as well. For instance if this feed is for a blog you can also add the authors email address, a link to the comment section of the post, and you can imbed audio and video clips into the description.
If you’re going to submit this to the iTunes popdcast directory, you can add a category node and an enclosure link that downloads the video or audio podcast that is related to this item. The enclosure contains the podcast URL, the link and bytes, and what type of media it is. Once you’ve got all this, and you’ve added all the items that you want in your feed, then save the file as feed.xml and upload it to your webserver. Now if anyone wants to subscribe to updates on your website, just them the links to your feed.xml file.
If you’re not in the coding, there is a much easier way to create RSS feed. Go to this website and download RSS Builder which is a free program. After you’ve installed it, launch the program and start creating your new feed. On the left is where you entered the properties for the feed itself, you can see that each of these items represent each of the xml nodes that we created earlier. On the side is where you can add, delete and arrange items. It automatically fills in the published date for each items and you can add the title, link, category, link to the comments, authors, email address and description into the corresponding fields.
If you’re going to turn this into an iTunes podcast, you can use the enclosure tab to add a link to your podcast media whether it is an audio or video link. When you’re through, you can save it as feed.xml and then upload it directly to your server. If you have any questions or if you want to download the xml code that I showed in this video, please visit the link and the description, alright, well that’s it for this tutorial. For more, go to tinkernut.com.
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