Making an RSS news feed

Ok, so now you have your website and you are updating your information daily.

But a news feed could really change everything. Having a News Feed can place your content on other websites and create many backlinks back to your website!

Let’s first look a completed RSS feed. We will go into what everything means, but look at the code below and try to figure out what’s going on.

You will notice that the feed file closely resembles an HTML file.

RSS File:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>

<title>Pzeta.org</title>
<description>Creating directories for your browsing pleasure! </description>
<link>http://www.pzeta.org</link>
<item>

<title>New articles uploaded</title>
<description>I've uploaded a few articles in the Tools section of the website.</description>
<link>http://www.pzeta.org/seo_global/test.htm</link>
</item>

<item>
<title>New Downloads added</title>
<description>I've just added a few articles in the Tools section of the website.</description>
<link>http://aww.pzeta.org/seo_global/downloads.html</link>
</item>

</channel></rss>

Let’s go through each line.
The first line defines what XML version the feed is in. XML is basically a language used to represent a complex documents.

The second line <rss version="2.0"> defines which RSS version we’re dealing with. There have been a couple of previous versions, but the most recent at the time of right is version 2.0

Next, lets example the first set of tags and lines:

<title>Pzeta.org</title>
<description>Creating directories for your browsing pleasure! </description>
<link>http://www.pzeta.org</link>

These first few lines define the name of the feed, and the description about the site hosting the feed. For example, if you website was Catland.org, it would be something like

<title>Catland</title>
<description>Giving information about cats</description>
<link>http://www.catland.org</link>

After we’ve defined the identity of the website, the different news items are defined. Each item has a title, description and a link. Within the description, you can use HTML tags, which can link to images.
For example

<item>
<title>Cats found to hate Dogs</title>
<description>There has been a new study which has found that Cats hate Dogs. This was done at Catland University and …. </description>
<link>http://www.catland.com</link>
</item>

This code represents an item in the newsfeed. The newsfeed will consist of many of these entries one after the next, according to how many you want in the news feed.

The final code just closes off the rss file.
</channel></rss>

When making an RSS file, a program like notepad is sufficent. Save the file as either .rss or .xml and upload it to your server! You may then test it by creating another webpage to read RSS files; Check out the RSS reader tutorial on this website!

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