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RSS Explained

Copyright 2004 Mark Daoust

A lot of fuss has been made over RSS and the vast benefits
it can bring to webmasters on both ends of the RSS
syndication. However, a lot of webmasters have absolutely
no idea how to create an RSS feed or how they can
incorporate an RSS feed on their website. A tool is not
very useful if you do not know how to use it. It is with
this motivation that this article is written, to give you a
basic enough understanding of how you can both create an
RSS feed and how you can incorporate an RSS feed into your
website. First, we will look at what RSS really is.
Secondly, we will explain how you can create your own RSS
feed. Finally, we will look at how you incorporate RSS
feeds into your website.

What is RSS?

To understand RSS (Rich Site Summary), you must be in the
correct mindset. Think about the types of websites that
offer RSS feeds. First, there are the news and article
related websites. These make up the majority of the
websites who use RSS. There are also forums, web portals,
search engines, and news aggregators, to name a few. The
one thing all these types of websites have in common is
that they are all filled with a lot of information.
Organizing this information is the difficult part, and
organizing it in a way that others can syndicate and
customize the format is even more difficult. Enter RSS.

RSS organizes information within tags or labels and
places this information into what could be considered an
outline format. If you think about it, all information can
be organized into separate parts. As an example, an
article website is made up of articles. Each article can
be considered its own part of the site. Within each
article there are parts as well, such as the title of the
article, a description of the article, the date the article
was published, who wrote the article, and so on. What RSS
does is to present these parts in a uniform, organized
format.

RSS organizes information the same way every time. An RSS
feed can be broken down into a few parts. First RSS
presents the header information such as the XML version and
various comments. This is more for the computers than it
is for the readers. Next RSS presents information about the
website. The information presented here can vary, but
typically there will be the name of the site, a link to the
site, the webmasters e-mail address, and maybe the last
time the feed was updated. The next part to an RSS feed is
the actual content of the feed.

To understand more about how RSS organizes information, it
would be useful to see how an RSS feed is published. Even
if you have no intention on publishing a feed, you should
read the next section.

Publishing an RSS Feed

Because RSS is focused on organizing content, creating an
RSS feed is fairly easy to do. The below example is
extremely simplified. RSS has quite a bit more flexibility
than is demonstrated here, but for most webmasters a basic
RSS feed is all that is needed.

An RSS feed can be broken up into a few simple parts.
Similar to regular HTML, the first part of an RSS feed is
the header information. A sample RSS header is located
below:

[code]
?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?
!-- Publishing tool used --
rss version="0.91"
[/code]

The header is normally the same from feed to feed. There
are only two things you need to make note of here, the
Publishing tool used line and the RSS version line. The
second line, which reads Publishing tool used is actually
just a comment line. It is a good idea to label your work,
so you may want to label it MySite.com Auto RSS Generator
or something to the same effect.

The second thing to note is the RSS version number. There
are actually seven different RSS versions. When wondering
what version you should use, chances are very good that RSS
0.91 will suit your needs just fine. This is the simplest
version available and it seems to cover just about every
basic publishers needs.

After the header comes the actual content. All of the
content is surrounded by channel tags. Below is a
snippet of an RSS feed that contains just two stories:

[code]
channel
titleWebsite Title, or Title of Section On Your
Site/title
linkhttp://www.yoursite.com//link
descriptionA short description of what your website
is/description
webmasterWho is the webmaster of your
site?/webmaster
languageen-us/language
item
titleTitle of the first story that we are
focusing on/title

linkhttp://www.yoursite.com/directlinktoarticle.html/link

authorAuthors Name/author
dateThe date the article was published/date
descriptionThis is the description of my
article/description
/item
item
titleThe title of the second article/title

linkhttp://www.yoursite.com/directlinktootherarticle.htm/
link
authorAuthors Name/author
dataDate Published/data
descriptionThis description will describe the
second article./description
/item
/channel
[/code]

You can see that the channel tags surround everything.

Within the channel tags lies the content being syndicated.
We have the title of the site, the site description, a
place for a webmasters e-mail address, and the language
that the site is in. You can add more tags if you like.
For example, if you want to include information on when the
feed was last updated, you might include a tag called
lastUpdate. Whatever information you want to give those
who are syndicating your content, you can give them.

After this information are the item tags. The item tags
allow you to separate the content being syndicated. In
this example, the item tags separate each article. If you
were a search engine, you would separate your listings with
the item tag. Again, think about this in the most basic
sense. Each item tag separates items.

Within the item tags is the bread and butter of your RSS
feed. In the above example, each item tag separates an
article, or story. Within the item tag, we have more tags
which identify the title of the article, a link to the full
article, the articles author, the date published, and a
description of the article. Again, you could include more
information or less information depending on what your
goals are.

There is one final step to create your RSS feed: closing
all your tags. RSS is very picky about open tags. So,
when creating your RSS feed, make sure you close the RSS
tag that we opened back in the header:

[code]
/rss
[/code]

Now simply save this information as an XML document and you
will have a valid RSS feed! You can actually save the
document with any file extension you like, but it will not
show up as a nice looking XML document in your browser
unless you save it as .xml. So, to close this part of the
article, the final sample RSS feed looks like the following:

[code]
?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?
!-- Publishing tool used --
rss version="0.91"
channel
titleWebsite Title, or Title of Section On Your
Site/title
linkhttp://www.yoursite.com//link
descriptionA short description of what your website
is/description
webmasterWho is the webmaster of your
site?/webmaster
languageen-us/language
item
titleTitle of the first story that we are
focusing on/title

linkhttp://www.yoursite.com/directlinktoarticle.html/link

authorAuthors Name/author
dateThe date the article was published/date
descriptionThis is the description of my
article/description
/item
item
titleThe title of the second article/title

linkhttp://www.yoursite.com/directlinktootherarticle.htm/
link
authorAuthors Name/author
dataDate Published/data
descriptionThis description will describe the
second article./description
/item
/channel
/rss
[/code]

Putting an RSS Feed on Your Website

Why would any webmaster choose an RSS feed over a
JavaScript, iFrame, PHP, or other type of feed? The answer
is simply flexibility. With an RSS feed, you can take the
content, arrange it how you want, make it fit the exact
look and feel of your website, and control how much or how
little information you are displaying on your website.
And, unlike JavaScript, search engines will be able to read
the content you are displaying on your site.

But how, exactly, does one take the content that is
formatted to the RSS feed and turn that into workable HTML
on your site? There is no other way than to parse the
information using some programming code. Now, if you are
not a programmer, do not be afraid by this. Because RSS is
so well organized, converting information from an RSS feed
to HTML is actually very simple.

The first way is to use an RSS parsing script. To find a
good script that does this, just go to
http://www.hotscripts.com, or any other script repository,
choose the language that you are most comfortable with and
look under the XML section. This will probably be the
option that most webmasters end up taking. Because of many
webmasters unfamiliarity with programming languages,
pre-written scripts are a good way to get that RSS feed on
your website.

If you are feeling more adventurous, you can attempt to
parse the RSS feed on your own. Although this may sound
like a daunting task, it is actually a lot easier than it
seems. Remember, RSS was developed to organize
information. Because RSS presents you with information
already organized into constant, recognizable tags, pulling
information out of an RSS feed becomes highly simplified.
Even better, parsing RSS feeds is a topic that many
articles have been written on. You should be able to find
an example written somewhere that you can fairly easily
apply.

Many webmasters do not have any knowledge of programming at
all and do not feel comfortable installing scripts or
writing their own parsing scripts. Although it is highly
encouraged that all webmasters learn to not fear
programming languages such as PHP or ASP, you always have
the option to hire a programmer to write a quick RSS parser
for you. In all reality, if your requirements are simple,
an RSS feed parser should take an experienced programmer no
time at all to write. You should not have to pay much to
have this done for you.

RSS: Useful for Both Distributors and Publishers

As a webmaster, you should not be afraid to use RSS. If
you have a lot of information, or if you have information
that quickly changes, RSS will allow you to syndicate that
information. There is definite viral marketing value in
providing an RSS feed. If you want to incorporate
information from another website, an RSS feed offers that
information in a highly organized fashion allowing you to
easily translate that information into the format that you
want.

RSS places both your information at the fingertips of
thousands across the web and gives you access to the webs
best content. Because of the many benefits of RSS for both
information distributors and publishers, expect to see
RSS stick around for quite some time.

------------------------------
Discuss this topic further at
http://forums.site-reference.com

Mark Daoust is the owner of Site Reference
(http://www.site-reference.com) Marketing Articles.
Thousands of marketing articles along with marketing
resources and marketing forums are available.

More articles by Mark Daoust - http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Mark-Daoust-112/

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