Generate More Traffic to Your Site with RSS
News Feeds and Syndication

You now have the basic content of your RSS feed, but how do you package this up and make it available to your audience? RSS feeds are defined in something called XML (eXtensible Markup Language) which is a way of defining information in terms of well-defined tags (descriptive elements) that define what the data contained within them is. XML tags are just like HTML tags in that you have a start tag and an end tag and they even have the same semantics as HTML tags. For example, the tags defining the Title of an RSS element are <title> and </title> so that the title in the example above would be encoded as:

<title>The essential guide to buying your next CPU</title>

As you can see, the basics of writing an RSS feed are very simple indeed. This may well surprise you, especially if you've had occasion to read any of the formal RSS specifications which seem to be interminable definitions of all the tags available and what they do (though often these tags are not very well defined) and one can become very confused about which tags should be used. Part of this confusion comes from the way RSS evolved.

The first specification version of RSS was developed by Netscape in 1999 for use by the My Netscape personal portal. This was prototype was released as RSS 0.91 (and incorporated some of the specifications defined by Dave Winer in his Scripting News weblog) and though by no means complete it did point towards the direction RSS should go. However, Netscape lost interest in the project and being ownerless a group called RSS-DEV was set-up to effectively look after the format. At the same time Dave Winer unilaterally posted a version of RSS modified to 0.92, declaring that his company, UserLand Software owned the specification. The debate raged and RSS-DEV went on to produced the RSS 1.0 specification in December 2000. Wiener then released two further updates to his RSS 0.92 specification (RSS 0.93 and RSS 0.94, respectively) before releasing the full RSS 2.0 specification. Several versions of RSS 2 were released, but the version number was not increased. Then, in July 2003 the ownership of RSS 2 was assigned to Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society.

Thus we have two separate but not entirely compatible implementations of the RSS standard though the use of extensions in both branches now makes it possible for one to effectively track the innovations provided by the other. The RSS 2.0 specification effectively became frozen during 2004 (though it continues to be updated). As a result a new syndication specification, Atom was developed and this specification became adopted by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). RSS 1.0 and 2.0 overlap into whereas the Atom specification is quite different and the relative benefits of the three specifications are currently a matter of heated debate.

Creating your own Feed

In reality all you need for your first RSS datafeed is a subset of the tags defined in the RSS 1.0 and 2.0 specifications (we'll leave Atom for another discussion). You've already encountered the <title> tag. To complete the simple example given above then you will also need the <description> and <link> tags. When applied to our example text we get:

<title>The essential guide to buying your next CPU<\title>
<description>I've been looking at systems based around everything from cheap pentium CPUs to the latest generation of 64-bit and dual core offerings. Find out what I learnt here...<\description>
<link>http://www.celtnet.org.uk/commercial/cpu.html<\link>

With the three tags described here you have all the information you need to encode the text for your basic RSS feed. Remember, however, that you are allowed a maximum of fifteen items in a single feed. After this you will either need to update the contents of your feed or you will have to provide a separate feed.

But we're not quite done yet. All you have so far is a way of encoding the various articles you want to include in your RSS feed. The next step is to complete the definition of the feed itself. Each individual entry in your RSS feed must be defined as such. This is done by enclosing the entire entry in <item> tags:

<item>
<title>The essential guide to buying your next CPU<\title>
<description>I've been looking at systems based around everything from cheap pentium CPUs to the latest generation of 64-bit and dual core offerings. Find out what I learnt here...<\description>
<link>http://www.celtnet.org.uk/commercial/cpu.html<\link>
<\item>


We now have the contents of our RSS feed defined. The next step is to let people know where the RSS feed came from. In RSS parlance each feed is called a channel and this gives your readers information about your entire site. However, the channel information still uses the familiar tags that you've already encountered:

<title>Build Your Own PC<\title>
<description>Ever thought of building or upgrading your own PC? This site tells you how. It takes you through the latest advances in technology and lets you know what you should buy and why.<\description>
<link>http://www.celtnet.org.uk/commercial/build_pc.html<\link>


Remember, you only need to define the 'channel' heading once. All the <item> entries then follow one after the other. We're almost done, but not quite there yet. If you're familiar with HTML web pages you'll know that each page generally starts with a <DOCTYPE> definition stating what type of document the page is (HTML, XML etc). The same is true of an RSS feed. Except that you have two definitions.

As we saw in the potted history above RSS is based on the XML standard thus we have to define both the XML version used in the feed and the RSS version. However, this is a simple invocation requiring specific tags at the very beginning of the document and the closing of these selfsame tags at the end eg:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>


<\channel>
<\rss>

Putting it all together:

We now have all our tags and a single line of content. Adding a further line of content and placing all the elements together we have our first RSS feed:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>

<title>Build Your Own PC<\title>
<description>Ever thought of building or upgrading your own PC? This site tells you how. It takes you through the latest advances in technology and lets you know what you should buy and why.<\description>
<link>http://www.celtnet.org.uk/commercial/build_pc.html<\link>

<item>
<title>The essential guide to buying your next CPU<\title>
<description>I've been looking at systems based around everything from cheap pentium CPUs to the latest generation of 64-bit and dual core offerings. Find out what I learnt here...<\description>
<link>http://www.celtnet.org.uk/commercial/cpu.html<\link>
<\item>

<item>
<title>How to match your motherboard to your CPI<\title>
<description>You've now chosen the CPU for your new computer. Now you need a motherboard that will match your CPU. Learn what your motherboard can do and what features to look out for...<\description>
<link>http://www.celtnet.org.uk/commercial/mobo.html<\link>
<\item>

<\channel>
<\rss>

The code above is a fully-functioning RSS stream. Of course it's still only a document defining a single channel for your website. You now have to save the file. It could be saved anywhere on your website but it must have the extension .xml. In my case this RSS feed is being saved as http://www.celtnet.org.uk/commercial/feed.xml.

Now that your feed is safely saved you still need to make sure that you've done everything correctly. If you haven't then your feed will be ignored by the various readers that you want to serve your feed. Thankfully, however, there's a freely-available Feed Validator service that will do precisely this for you. Simply type the URL that defines your feed and the validator will check it out for you. Assuming that there are no problems you'll now want the entire world to know about your RSS feed. Alternatively you can use the W3C's own Feed Validation Service.

Get Syndicated!

The process of making your RSS feed available is known as Syndication. First, you should provide a link to the RSS feed on your own site. Assuming the RSS has been validated then use this image which can be obtained from the Feed Validator site. Also, you can use these images to indicate that you have an RSS feed available: and .

If you think that you've got a truly superb RSS feed or Blog (weblog) then you could use something like the text below to advertise your feed to other webmasters:

Webmasters... Click on the link below to feature the Celtnet News Blog headlines on your own site: RSS Feed for this Site