The RSS Advantage

This is the fourth of a six part series on manually building an RSS feed for your website. The series is targeted at non-technical beginners without any prior knowledge of RSS.

Previous posts: Building an RSS feed: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

In this part I will show you how to create your news items (known as entries in Atom). Open up your XML Notepad and load your “atom.xml” file from the previous part. Expand the entry element as shown in the screenshot below:

You will need to edit and update the following items:

1. title - this is title or headline of your newsitem
2. expand the link element and update the href attribute with the URL to the newsitem. For example: http://www.MyWebSite.com/articles/article541.htm.
3. id - This is the id of the newsitem. id values must be unique within a feed. A good rule of thumb here is to just use the same URL as the link in point #2.
4. published - this is the timestamp that your news item was first created. (See part 3 for more details about the timestamp format)
5. updated - this is the timestamp for when your new item was last updated or edited.
6. summary - The summary contains a short description or excerpt of your news item.
7. author - Expand the author element and enter the your name in the name element and your website URL in the uri element.

To add additional news items:

1. Right-click on the entry element with your mouse and select copy
2. Then click on the feed element to select it.
3. Go to the menu and select Edit > Paste Struncture.

When you have finished editing your Atom feed, save it and upload it to your web server.

Some Important Notes:

1. Always make sure that you edit the correct entry and check the sort order of your entries. The newset entry should always be the FIRST one under the updated element and the oldest one is the LAST one in the structure.
2. Limit the number of items in your feed list. You shouldn’t have too many because this will bloat the file size and may upset some RSS readers or the search engines. A good rule of thumb is to keep about ten to twenty items in the feed at one time.

That’s it for today.

Technorati Tags: Publishing RSS Feeds; Build an RSS feed

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Publishing RSS Feeds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.