RSS feeds and CMS web site
My cms@ec web site now has an RSS feed coming from this blog and the Management 110 blog. In addition, for my technophile public’s delectation and delight I have constructed a RRS 2.0 feed (fully valid no less) from the same cms@ec web site. Here it is .
How it’s done
“Toad straddled on the hearth-rug, thrust his paw into his trouser-pocket and pulled out a handful of silver. `Look at that!’ he cried, displaying it. `That’s not so bad, is it, for a few minutes’ work? And how do you think I done it, Mole? Horse- dealing! That’s how I done it!’”
Kenneth Grahame “Wind in the Willows”
- Create a web page to display RSS feed.
I used the Feed2JS service by Alan Levine fom Maricopa Community Colleges. It’s totally brill - you just build the javascript snippet on this page from your RSS feed and paste it into your own web page. You can use one of their stylesheets to style the output or roll your own like what I did to match my own site. Note that the javascript does call the php from the Maricopa site so if this is down for any reason the script won’t work. I thought about implementing the script from my own Rahu account (and the code is downloadable ) but the Magpie RSS parser requires php version 4.2 and we’re currently stuck at v4.0 on Rahu (a source of problems for me I might add … I spent ages sussing out the new version of Gallery only to find that it required php 4.3 or above).
- Build your own RSS feed.
This is how I created a static RSS feed as a single file - creating a dynamic feed from a database is a lot more complicated. I started with How to Create Your Own RSS Feed from the Contentious blog and moved to part 8:Publishing your own webfeed. However, these links while giving very useful background didn’t help with the mechanics, so I turned to Stephen Downes’ tutorial How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer but the problem with this was that I couldn’t drink beer in the office and anyway I had run out of Guinness my favourite tipple. Enter UKOLN. I found the RSS xpress site which is basically a web based RSS channel editor. You have to know a bit about what you’re doing, and the EEVL RSS - A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers is really great for that and then you can fill in the form fields with appropriate information for your local site, ‘save’ generates a downloadable xml file and just dump it into an appropriate directory on your site. The beauty of this system is that then you can come back, load the existing RSS file and delete old items and add new ones. Piece of cake! Finally, having generated the xml feed file you’ll want to validate it with Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby’s RSS Validator — this is important cos I picked up on some apostrophes that I had to escape — and you’ll get the right to use the cool “valid RSS” gif on your site like what I did.
Lastest Update (March 11th)
RSS Editor is a brilliant extension for Mozilla Firefox that enables you to build and edit your XML file for RSS feed (you’ll still need to download it to a suitable place on your site). This makes creating and editing the RSS feed file a lot easier than the web site listed above. Dead Brill :-)
Posted by markp at March 9, 2005 12:08 PM
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