Demonstrating RSS Offline

January 17, 2005 2:07 PM

Say I need to demonstrate RSS on a computer that is not online. I create an xml file on my hard drive that contains the item 'headlines' and the urls they should lead to. I point firefox to that file as a 'live bookmark' and FeedReader to that file as a feed, but neither of them will show the headlines I created in the heading sidebar. Why not? How can I create my own 'feed' and demonstrate it without actually having that xml file on another computer?
posted by bingo to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Of course you can. Did you check to make sure your XML is valid?
posted by furtive at 2:56 PM on January 17, 2005

If your reader insists on using http to fetch the feed, you could always set up a webserver running on localhost. I'm not familiar with Windows offerings, but I'm sure there are simple lightweight servers well suited for serving up static pages.
posted by Eamon at 3:13 PM on January 17, 2005

Response by poster: furtive: it is, and in fact it works as a feed if i put it on a remote server. I should probably use a webserver on localhost. I thought that that would be a difficult, involved process since I have no experience in that area, but perhaps not.
posted by bingo at 3:47 PM on January 17, 2005

Just a guess here, but I think the issue is probably the MIME type of the file. I believe that the correct MIME type for an RSS feed to be picked up by Firefox or IE is "text/xml" and that may get munged if you save that file locally (hm, just tried it, works OK on FF).

Also, make sure that the beginning of that XML file is clean (no extra spaces or line returns before that <?xml> tag).
posted by costas at 3:57 PM on January 17, 2005

Yeah, I think Apache even has a point-and-click installer now. Though you might want to investiagte IIS if it's already installed on your computer. I think Apache is infinitely better, but it takes a while to learn. If this is a throwaway thing, setting up a simple site in IIS might be easier.
posted by yerfatma at 4:34 PM on January 17, 2005