RSS News Feeds

Information for webmasters
(RSS 101)

Setting up a RSS news feed for your site is really quite simple. I searched the web and found a whole lot of information, a lot of which was very confusing. I waded through it, gleaned out the information that was pertinent to me (or that I at least understood), did a little experimenting, and got it to work. So, here is what you really need to know about setting up a basic news feed.

To do this, you must have some very basic HTML editing experience. You don't need to know a lot, but knowing what tags are and what they do really will help. It will also help to know a little about XML, although there are ways to get your XML/RSS file built and maintained without knowing most of the XML intricacies.

You won't need a bunch of new software other than getting a news reader to see what your feed looks like. A basic text editor can get you through all of this. In Windows, Notepad will work fine.

In my hunt for information I came across several different types of RSS and how to build feeds for them. I wanted something very basic and settled on building a RSS 0.91 compliant feed. You really don't need to know what that is other than it's the most basic, and therefore easiest to build and maintain. This "tutorial" will show you how to build a news feed for RSS 0.91. If you are a quick study, you could probably have a feed up and running about 30 minutes after reading this. If you're not so quick, like me, give it an hour to an hour-and-a-half. So, let's get started.

First, you need to build an XML/RSS file. This will be the file containing all the items that your news feed distributes. If you know anything about XML, you may remember that there is no set of tags; you can create almost any tag and it works. In the case of RSS, that's almost true. However, RSS readers depend on having a set of common tags so they know what to do with the information contained in those tags. So you can't go creating your own tags willy-nilly and expect it to work. I haven't used all the tags permissible in our feed but you can take a look at it to see the structure and tags used. See this (In IE, right-click this link, and select "Save target as...") Note that this is just an XML file renamed with a *.rss file extension. You can save this file to your hard drive, edit the information in your text editor to what you need and use it. One comment about the <item> tag: you may want to limit yourself to only about 6-12 "items". I'm not sure there's a restriction, but keeping things short and sweet is probably a good thing. There is a restriction on what you can put in the item's "children" tags. You cannot use HTML tags at all. So you cannot use formatting tags such as <b>, <i>, etc. or use links (<a href="...">). So remember to keep it simple.

An alternative to editing in a text editor is to create your XML file online. This RSS Channel Editor from webreference.com is what I used to create my basic XML file just to see what tags were used and what the file structure was. In fact, you can edit your existing news feed file by calling it in the form, adding/editing it, and saving the output.

However you create your feed file, remember to save it with a *.rss extension. Your text editor may not let you do that. If that's the case, rename it in its folder by right-clicking on the file, selecting Rename from the context menu and changing the extension. Windows will complain about how the file may become "unstable". Don't pay attention to that. For future editing you may have to tell Windows what program you want used for opening that file type. Just use your text editor.

Alright, you've created your feed file. You now need to edit at least one of your web pages to have the subscription information available to your users. There are 2 things you need to add to each page. We'll go through the steps needed for each one, but once created, you can copy/paste the code on each page you need it. Pretty quick and simple.

1. Create the XML graphic link:
   1. Steal this graphic ==> (right-click, save as...)
   2. Open the HTML file in which you want to add the subscription information. You'll need to do this in a text/HTML editor, or change to a "view source" mode in a WYSIWYG editor such as FrontPage.
   3. Copy the code below and paste it wherever you want the XML graphic/link to appear.
      <a type="application/rss+xml" href="path-to-my-news-feed-file.rss" title="My RSS news feed"><img src="path-to-my-image/rss.png" width="80" height="RSS" border="0" alt="XML-RSS icon, link to my news feed" /></a>
      Obviously(?), change paths, alts, titles, etc. to what fits your page/site.
2. Create the RSS icon link for Mozilla, Opera, and IE7+ browsers:
   This makes the RSS icon show up in the address entry area (Firefox v1.5+ and Opera 9+) or the "Command Bar" (IE7+) and causes the appropriate information to appear when that icon is clicked (see previous page).
1. Open the HTML file in which you want to add the subscription information. You'll need to do this in a text/HTML editor, or change to a "view source" mode in a WYSIWYG editor such as FrontPage.
2. Copy the code below and paste it somewhere between your <head> and </head> tags.
   <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="path-to-my-rss-file/my_news.rss" title="My RSS news feed" />
   Again, change paths, alts, titles, etc. to what fits your page/site. Note that what is in the "title" attribute will be what displays in the popup when a user clicks on the RSS icon.

That's all you need to create or edit. Upload the *.rss file, the XML/RSS graphic, and the affected HTML files to your server and test it.

More RSS/XML information

• W3School's XML tutorial — good instruction on XML basics
• W3School's RSS tutorial — a tutorial on building a RSS 2.0 feed
• Somewhat unbelievably, Microsoft's XML Notepad is a pretty decent, small, easy to use piece of software. And free.
• My original Google search term was "RSS news feed". But also search for "RSS tutorial" and "RSS 101". Have fun!
• RSS Workshop - a Tutorial — a long page with many, many links (some dead). A lot of the information here came from information found on that page.
• RSS - A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers — a fairly comprehensive, 1-page, tutorial.
• RSS 0.91 Spec
• B!Soft RSS Builder — free software that allows you to build and publish a RSS2.0-compliant newsfeed. Requires .net framework.
• Super Simple RSS — free software that allows you to build a RSS2.0-compliant newsfeed. Does not require .net framework.
• Validate your feed — Very important! Some readers choke on, or won't display malformed feeds.