How to setup a RSS Feed

These days most sites have an RSS feed to keep their users to up to date, in fact most CMS system have it built in but what if run a static site and want to be able to keep your customers up to date on small changes like addition to portfolio’s? Well in this tutorial I am going to show you how to setup an RSS feed using XML.

First you need to create a file called feed.rss, you can change the feed to whatever you want but feed for me is easy to remember and short.

To start you all in channel information at the top abit like the head tags on a HTML page, just copy paste from below and then edit appropriately.

<?xml version="1.0" ?> 
<rss version="0.91">
<channel>
    <title>Web Designer Help</title>
    <link>http://www.webdesignerhelp.co.uk</link>
    <description>Latest Tutorials/Articles</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <copyright>Copyright 2008-2009 WebDesignerHelp</copyright>
    <lastBuildDate>tue, 6 Jan 2009</lastBuildDate>

If you want to use an image to accompany your feed you just use the code below but again change it appropriately.

<image>
    <title>Web Designer Help</title>
    <url>http://www.webdesignerhelp.co.uk/images/rss.gif</url>
    <link>http://www.webdesignerhelp.co.uk</link>
</image>

In the next section you will adding an item which is basically a story, you can add more than one by just copy and pasting the code and editing to suit your needs.

<item>
      <title>Setup an RSS Feed</title>
      <description>A basic tutorial on how to setup an RSS feed</description>
      <link>http://www.webdesignerhelp.co.uk/how-to-setup-an-rss-feed.html</link>
      <author>thomas@thomashardy.me.uk</author>
      <pubDate>Tue, 6 Jan 2009</pubDate>
</item>

As I said above you are not limited to just, just copy and paste each item and then edit it. When you’re finished, you then close the channel and rss tags.

</channel>
</rss>

Once done you can then check your feed validates at Feed Validator. If it validates then you can start to advertise the feed on your site by linking to it, to link to it you just link to feed.rss file and then the users browsers will bring up your feed with latest posts.

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5 Comments to “How to setup a RSS Feed”

#1 Posted by mike2333 (02.04.09 at 12:39 )

Okay, so I pasted the coded you provided above into a file that’s now called feed.rss

Now, how do I make it work?

#2 Posted by Thomas Hardy (02.04.09 at 12:54 )

Hi Mike,

You can then either link it up to feedburner like I have on this site or just link to it directly.

#3 Posted by huwaw69 (21.04.09 at 13:02 )

This is a good tutorial to setup and RSS feed… specially if you don’t know how to make yet…

#4 Posted by ken (18.10.09 at 23:02 )

Can this be used to send sms messages from the web page?

#5 Posted by TerminatorSalvation (05.12.09 at 02:21 )

thanks! bookmarked :D