rrs feed

May 23, 2005 3:03 PM

I really want to add an RSS feed and XML feed to my site... and anything else that everyone is doing. Can someone PLEASE show me the most simplest way/site of adding this essential element to my site?
posted by bamassippi to technology (12 comments total)

What's your site, and are you using a CMS or weblogging tool as a backend? Tools like Movable Type, Textpattern, Drupal, or Wordpress will do this for you automatically.
posted by mrbill at 3:06 PM on May 23, 2005

Err, what sort of content do you want to syndicate? Sounds like you just want to do something without understanding the reasons for which it's done.
posted by xmutex at 3:07 PM on May 23, 2005

My site is... Juicee News Daily

I want any headlines, any new articles I run to appear on people Bloglines, their Kinja digest, their 'MY Yahoo!' digest... etc.
posted by bamassippi at 3:14 PM on May 23, 2005

So do you want to create an RSS feed of your own content that people can subscriber to through Bloglines, etc., or do you want to display some RSS feeds of other sites in your web interface? From your last comment it looks like you mean the former.
posted by matildaben at 3:36 PM on May 23, 2005

Do you want to syndicate the feeds of other peoples stories you link (Reuters, Yahoo, CNN) to as your own? Or the stories written by you and your writers that re individually yours (which from what I can see are just cut and paste of wikipedia)?

Either way you seem to be breaking both wikipedia's redistribution copyright (GFDL) and the copyrights of the other media sources you aggregate buy redistubitng them entirely under your own copyright. I think the "why?" question is more important here than the "how".
posted by karmaville at 3:49 PM on May 23, 2005

As I re-read what I wrote I wanted to say sorry if that sounds like a snark, it really wasn't meant to be, I am just trying to understand your motivation here.
posted by karmaville at 3:52 PM on May 23, 2005

Have a look at the source of the Ask Metafilter RSS feed. You'll see each post as an <item>, which contains an <title>, <link> and <description>, which in turn contain exactly what you expect. To add RSS to your site, you need to create a file just like that, make it available from a fixed web address, and make sure it is updated whenever new posts are added to your site. How you make this happen depends entirely on how your site is run, which I can't tell by looking at it.

That's the principle. There are loads of implementation details. The most common beginner's mistake is not to escape characters. You need to replace every & character in your original text with &amp; and then replace every < with &lt; before the text goes in to the RSS file.

Useful resources are the RSS 2.0 specification, and the Feed Validator for testing whether you've made it work properly. I could go on and on, but that's the basics covered.
posted by cillit bang at 3:54 PM on May 23, 2005

If you do use a blog CMS it will syndicate your content for you. Looking at your source code it appears you used Yahoo PageBuilder to build your page, so I will assume you will need to manually create your RSS, which is an XML file.

If by luck you are using a Mac, there is an application called Feeder that will create the xml file for you. If you're using a PC, perhaps someone here can point you to a Windows application that will do the same thing.

Then just create a link and perhaps use the RSS or XML graphic everyone uses (on an orange rectangle). People will then be able to subscribe to that xml URL for updates.

I recently began creating RSS feeds for a section of our museum's Web site. I found that creating a popup window that explains what RSS is and how to subscribe to the feed was something that would help sell RSS to our visitors (who really don't know what RSS is). You can see the explanation I wrote by going to our museum's Interact section, then click on the RSS link at the bottom of the page and the popup will appear.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 4:36 PM on May 23, 2005

I don't want this to come off as a snark in the green, but I'm not clear on what you want.

I get the idea that you desire a way to syndicate your syndication (unless your making all those updates by hand, in which case I would advise seeking professional help; nonetheless, it's very meta of you). I'm not sure what you gain by publishing a feed. Myself, I would be more likely to create an OPML file and allow my readers to subscribe to the same sites I was already syndicating.

As mentioned above, the specs are fairly clear cut but you would want a way to generate the feeds, Zeldman is the only person I know who writes them by hand and he only updates a few times a month these days. Along more constructive lines, it would be trivial to shove your content into WordPress/Textpattern/MT/Drupal/etc. -- all of which provide plugins for feed parsing and generate your RSS, Atom or what have you.
posted by cedar at 4:47 PM on May 23, 2005

If you give Carlo &euro2.50, he'll build a custom feed for you via screenscraping. It's kind of a dorky way to do a feed for a site you run, but you can't beat the convenience or the price.
posted by Nelson at 5:22 PM on May 23, 2005

All the cool kids hand code.
posted by alan at 8:55 PM on May 23, 2005

If you decide to hand code, be very careful. XML is real touchy about hidden characters. If you copy and paste (especially from a Web page) that's easy to do.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 6:28 AM on May 24, 2005