In this tutorial, I will present how to make a new RSS feed in your site. I’ll explain the implementation issues, with different options (from easy or no coding t hard coding, etc) to perform the implementation. It is designed for ay people- non-programmers to programmers to design a RSS feed.

Ok, first I’ll present the big picture of the desired RSS feed.

A) Big Picture : First I’ll show what I want to make. The overall view is essential to present the RSS look-and-feel to your boss or administrator before doing any coding.

One ‘RSS’ button should make a link from one of your source page. Clicking on that button, the following page should appear.

Figure 1: Main view of the desired RSS feed

Now I will explain how to start coding. Before coding, two easy solutions are there that you can take into account. Start reading.

B) Easy solutions (mainly for non-programmers):

From the administrative point of view, you can do either of the following two things :

• Buy or ask for a RSS component to your web-design companies. Most web-design companies use CMS (content management systems) to make your site. And almost all CMS has plugins or extensions of RSS ready to be used in a site. It is just a matter of enabling the option into your site without almost any coding from your website designers. So don’t miss the chance asking them to enable that option!
• There are many free web-companies to prepare a RSS feed for your company. What you need to do is as follows: a) Make a XML RSS feed like Part C of this tutorial below, and b) link your prepared XML RSS feed from that web-company. Prior this operation you need to register. It is also simple, isn’t it?

However, if you want to program, keep on reading. I’ll touch every options to make your RSS workable and efficient.

C) Main RSS feed (The XML one!)

The left part of Figure 1 is actually the main RSS feed to be used in a website. It’s a XML file that Internet Explorer and many others can read and parse and present accordingly (with subscription link as well).

Tools like ‘Feed editor’ (need to be activated after a period), RSSEditor (free), etc can be used to make a RSS feed (xml file). You’ll put that xml file into your site and it works fine. However, you need to validate RSS feed using a plugin of those tools (if available) or different free validator around the web. You can get many such validators after doing a little searching in the web.