RSS Tutorial
By Mark Nottingham
2007-12-23
Publishing Your Feed
There are a number of ways to generate a feed from your content. First of
all, explore your content management system - it might already have an option
to generate an RSS feed.
If that option isn’t available, you have a number of choices;
- Self-scraping — The easiest way to publish a feed from
existing content. Scraping tools fetch your Web page and pull
out the relevant parts for the feed, so that you don’t have to change
your publishing system. Some use regular expressions or XPath
expressions, while others require you to mark up your page with minimal
hints (usually using <div> or <span> tags) that help it
decide what should be put into the feed.
- Feed integration — If your site is dynamically
generated (using languages like Perl, Python or PHP), it may have a RSS
library available, so that you can integrate the feed into your
publishing process.
- Starting with the feed — Alternatively, you can manage
the list-oriented parts of your content in the RSS feed itself, and
generate your Web pages (as well as other content, like e-mail lists)
from the feed. This has the advantage of always having the correct
information in the feed, and tools like XSLT make this option easy,
especially if you’re starting from scratch.
- Third party scraping — If none of these options work
for you, some people on the Web will scrape your site for you and make
the feed available. Be warned, however, that this is never as reliable or
accurate as doing it yourself, because they don’t know the details of
your content or your system. Also, using third parties introduces another
point of failure in the delivery process; problems there (network, server
or business) will cause your feed to be unavailable.
For more information about all of these options, see “Feed Tools” and “More Information”.
Tutorial Pages:
»
Introducing RSS
»
Choosing Content for Your Feeds
» Publishing Your Feed
»
Telling People About Your Feed
»
Format Versions and Modules
»
Which Format Should I Choose?
»
Tips for Generating Good Feeds
»
Feed Tools
»
More Information
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