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i have been going crazy trying to add a simple rss page to my website which is done in frontpage 2003, and while im excrutiatinly close, i cant get it working.
The feed is valid (checked with feedvalidator), and i can subscribe to it using things like bloglines and feed demon, but whenever i update the site (and rss.xml) file, no readers seem to recognize that a new story is there.
as an update: I dont have (or want) an rss feed in the true sense of the word. My blog consists of just one main page (index.html). All i want is for readers to be notified when that page is updated. I have written an rss.xml file which i update with the new date whenever i update the index page, but no reader can seem to realize the page has been updated.
Maybe it would help if i post my rss.xml file here for reference? here it is, below:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type='text/xsl' href='rss.xsl' version='1.0'?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<atom:link href="http://example.com/rss.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<title>example</title>
<link>http://www.example.com/</link>
<description>Get my latest ravings over at example!</description>
<item>
<title>example - My Place To Rant And Rave</title>
<link>http://example.com/index.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://example.com/index.html</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:00:00 EST</pubDate>
<description>My Latest Posts can be found here!</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
This is just the latest iteration of the file.. i have tried literally DOZENS of different versions.
My thought was that, if i update the index page (say for ex at 7:30 pm), then i also alter my rss file and change the pubdate to 7:30 (i've also tried making it earler say 7, or later, like 10). Nothing works.
this CAN'T be this hard... what am i missing?
Any help anyone out there can provide would be HUGELY appreciated.
thanks!
[edited by: jatar_k at 11:19 pm (utc) on April 29, 2008]
[edit reason] please use example.com [/edit]
no reader can seem to realize the page has been updated.
do you really think that could be the problem?
No dice.. i just changed made a quick update to index.html at 9:36 pm EST apr 29 and changed the rss.xml file to have a pub date of 30 Apr 2008 01:36:00 GMT and im still not picking up anything...
this is driving me completely batty... i just dont know what else to try...
Are you sure that these readers are actually fetching your revised feed? You may need to ping some services before they'll go out and fetch the feed. Otherwise you have to wait for them to work through their schedule.
in the header section of my index.html i have the announcer tag which, before i knew to add, readers kept saying i didnt even have a feed, but after i added the code below, that problem got fixed... i thought that this code would be doing the pinging that you are referring to...
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Slydesblog" href="http://example.com/rss.xml" />
You're using FP, so you'd have to do that step manually.
i'll research this today and let you know... thanks for the lead!
Also, i would like to make sure i am doing this right.
if i...
1) change my index.html page
2) change the pubdate on the file i listed above, with the date on the new, changed index.html
3) ftp the files up to my site..
shouldnt this be doing what i want it to do.. or do i not understand rss correctly?
forgive me for these questions, but up until this point i knew NOTHING about rss...
the issue isnt that the rss readers are taking a long time to put up my new posts... they NEVER report an update.. ever. im starting to think that rss ping isnt my problem...
In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.
Looking at your feed again, although it validates, it's not really a standard Atom feed [atompub.org]. For example, you're using the RSS <item> [rssboard.org] instead of <entry>. Perhaps you'd benefit from sticking to either the RSS or Atom format.
You could work around it by using URL arguments or anchors:
blahblah.foo/index.html?rev=44
blahblah.foo/index.html?rev=45 etc.. or:
blahblah.foo/index.html#rev=44
blahblah.foo/index.html#rev=45
Overall I fear that you aren't using RSS for its intended purpose.
if i headed up each story with a tag, when referenced the url with the tag in my rss.xml, do you think that would work?
and following that logic, i would then assume that i would need to make a new ITEM section for each story (and with each tag) that i post?
i agree with you that im not using rss the way its typically used, but unfortunatly with frontpage i cant see how else to do it.
thanks again.
I see what your saying... i had no idea i was mixing types... i'm kinda winging this as i go. could you point me to somewhere where i can get the layouts, or better yet samples, from both types of feeds?
I agree with vincevincevince that it sounds like you aren't using RSS in a standard way. You may want to look at the idea of using permalinks [en.wikipedia.org] when you create new content.
by using bookmarks to mark a new story, then referencing those bookmarks within my rss feed, ive got it working exactly how i have been wanting it to.
thanks again guys for all the super help!
again, thanks guys!
