RSS what's needed?

to offer RSS from a website

[henry0]

Hello
I have a client that would like offering a news feed; I never “played” with RSS

What do I need in order to set up the site to read RSS

Thanks

Regards

Henry

[Rosalind]

This thread will no doubt be moved to the RSS forum.

If you're providing an RSS feed, you don't set it up in a browser-readable format. There are several versions of RSS, first choose one to provide your feed in. Then create your feed, search for "RSS tutorial" and you'll find several that will help you with this task.

Validate your feed at [feedvalidator.org...] .

If you put links to your feed, that's all you need to do to allow anyone with a newsreader to find your feed and use it.

If you want to integrate other people's RSS feeds into your site, there are services around to help you do this. In theory you could do this to allow you to display your client's own feeds on a normal webpage on his site, but why bother? You might as well just write a script that puts up headlines and links to the news items, drawing on the same database that you use to update the RSS.

[Hester]

If you're providing an RSS feed, you don't set it up in a browser-readable format.

Why not? All it takes is a link to a stylesheet. Otherwise people clicking on the link to the feed will see lines of unbroken text in browsers like Opera, and not know why. (IE6 displays the file as a document tree.)

[eurotrash]

I found the following tutorial. I think it is good and others seem to agree.

[webmasterworld.com...]

I would suggest going through the tutorial first and then asking questions if you have a problem at all.

In this forum there are plenty of resources and you could also try signing up to a couple of Yahoo Groups which deal with RSS - there are groups for developers and users.

RSS 2.0 Specification:
[blogs.law.harvard.edu...]
RSS 1.0 Specification:
[web.resource.org...]
Intro to RSS:
[webreference.com...]

There is enough reading above to keep you busy for a couple of days at least.

Good Luck.

[henry0]

Thanks all for the info
OK let's start brain feeding!

regards

Henry

[Rosalind]

If you're providing an RSS feed, you don't set it up in a browser-readable format.

Why not? All it takes is a link to a stylesheet. Otherwise people clicking on the link to the feed will see lines of unbroken text in browsers like Opera, and not know why. (IE6 displays the file as a document tree.)

What I mean by that is that it doesn't display as a regular web page, and that people are meant to view it via a newsreader or some other script, rather than looking directly at the code. Not that you can't read it at all, just that most people don't like looking at raw xml. I guess I could have explained that more clearly.

[henry0]

Rosalind
this was what I understood; clear enough to me
thanks

[Hester]

What I mean by that is that it doesn't display as a regular web page, and that people are meant to view it via a newsreader or some other script, rather than looking directly at the code. Not that you can't read it at all, just that most people don't like looking at raw xml. I guess I could have explained that more clearly.

But this is my point. By adding a link in the XML file itself to a stylesheet, you are no longer looking at the code, but a page indistinguishable from a web page! I have set mine up so each entry is styled as a separate block, so it is readable. Try it and you'll see what I mean.