It's been pointed out to me recently, and rightly so, that although I've been telling everyone how important it is to have and promote and use RSS feeds for their sites, I haven't stopped to explain anything about how one would actually go about doing that. Personally, I recommend the use of RSS Pixy Dust, but, if you don't happen to have that available, it gets a little more complicated.
I've decided that the best way to provide a useful explanation that will satisfy the most people is to break the whole thing up into a series of articles that I'm calling “Please DO Feed the Sites.” In this way, people can look for the parts they need, and, if I should miss something, I can just tag it on later as an extra part. Currently, I have it planned as follows:
Part 1: Introduction (You're reading it now.)
Part 2: What Is RSS?
Part 3: Creating Outgoing Feeds
Part 4: Using Incoming Feeds
If I can get the time (and there's enough interest,) I will continue the series by showing you the creation of a hand-coded and maintained RSS feed which may be a possible working solution for some sites. I will also try to move on to a walkthrough demonstration showing the creation of database-driven, dynamically maintained and updated RSS feeds. I may also add other parts later.
I'm aiming high with this, but, again, it depends on the kind of response I get. If this is the kind of useful content that you want to see here, then you gotta let me know.
Author: Timothy Dungan
Previous article: 16 May 2007
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