Cobwebs Of The Mind: Basics of Blogging Series: Part Ten - Outline of How to Create an RSS Feed

Well so now you kind of like, are in love, or are obsessed with RSS. Those little orange buttons are all over and you want to put one up in your web site or Blog or on your wall. That is cool, and it will demand a bit of technical knowledge, some writing, some research and some frustration. So here are the major steps to publishing your RSS feed and giving all that information to the world at large, which I will discuss in depth with examples in this series of articles. Right now we will outline these steps.

I am again reminding you. That most blog software today will take care of RSS and Atom technology automatically. You have nothing to do nor do you have to worry about it. However, if you want to create a specialized RSS feed, one which contains only specific information, or one which can be fed out in numerous formats, you will have to learn the rudiments of RSS feeds and how they work. For those of you not interested in doing this, skip the articles on RSS, or just peruse them to get your feet wet.

1. Sit back, STOP! & Think. (How is that for step one?)

Do you have information that should or would go into an RSS file? Remember that the unwritten rules of RSS is that you must update the file with "new" and more "current" information if not hourly or daily, but at least on a fairly common basis. No one is going to want to keep your RSS in their reader if the information they see every day for the next month is exactly the same as the day before it.

Additionally, though some people do this, it really is NOT good practice to put long essays into an RSS feed. What you want is the first line or description of an object, idea or news. Hook the person so he clicks on the topic in his reader, reads the summary, clicks again and finds himself on your web page.

Do you have the time to do it? There are millions of Blogs out there that were started with the best of intentions. One entry, two entries, three entries. And then they die. Why? Because the author/owners simply had no clue about the dedication demanded and time needed to update their Blogs on a regular basis. They also had no idea just how difficult he competition was to get people to read those Blogs. The same is true with RSS. You start a feed to get readers, or to pass on information to the web. You need to understand this is going to take time and patience and work. This is not a one-time one-shot one-pie-in-the-sky deal.

2. Your depth of Technical knowledge

You will need to become familiar with the following terms and understand them and perhaps learn some very simple things in how to program them.

HTML

Atom

RSS Readers

RSS Parsers

RSS Validation

3. Now begins the Actual WORK!

Preparing the file - You will need a template RSS file (for the sake of these articles it will be called rss.xml though it can have any name you choose as long as it is in xml format.) Unless you are good enough to write one yourself this is critical.

Understanding the Template and what information goes where

Putting the information into the template - Each piece of information you have will go into specific [headers] and you must understand the RSS structure in the XML file to get that right.

Validating the Template - A crucial aspect. Unlike HTML, RSS is very, very, let me say this again, very unforgiving. It does not like deviations from the norm or from the basic format laid down. Getting it right can be the most trying and frustrating part of the process.

4. Okay now you wrote the RSS file, your XML file is ready and validated. Now what? Guess you think you are done. Think again.

You will have to place the rss.xml file on your web site or somewhere on the web where people can get to it.

Now you can steal, get, copy, make - whatever you choose - your own little XML/RSS or RSS - Valid button.

Hyperlink your file to the RSS

Submit your file under the correct category to RSS directories.

5. How many people will pick up your RSS? I will discuss this as well in a later article, but surprisingly, the answer here is still very vague. There are some ways of tracing the numbers, but none are foolproof, and most are very convoluted. In other words, unless your RSS feed is picked up by the news stations you really will never know, UNLESS, you know how to data-mine your web site logs or be very cagey using Google Analytics.

6. Go and get a good night's sleep cause tomorrow you are going to have to start the process of adding information to your RSS (or changing it) all over again! The next in this series will begin a study of the internals of the RSS feed and how to build it.

Previous Articles In This Series: