kroberge - 2:18 pm on Feb 8, 2009 (gmt 0)

I'm certain this has been asked before, so I apologize ahead of time but I couldn't find anything.

I'm experimenting with RSS feeds, right now I'm setting up one page of my site to be a feed. I've created my rss.xml file (appended to the end of the post) which I've validated at [feedvalidator.org...] I've also put a <link> tag on my page indicating that my page is a feed.

So far you can click on the feed icon in the address bar or on the link I provide on the page and firefox realizes its a feed and offers up options as how you want to subscribe. So I've subscribed using Google Reader.

The problem is that when I update content google reader doesn't realize this. So my question is, how does an aggregator realize when a page is updated? Does it scan the page itself or the XML file?

If it scans the XML file (which I think is the likely case) do you folks just write a script that takes your content (from your site) and dumps it into the xml file or do you do it by hand?

I've started from scratch on purpose, I like writing my own html and css and now I want to understand rss ground up.

Thanks so much for your time,

Kevin