Introduction to RSS
Creating a RSS Feed
A Few Extras & Downloads

I'm only going to tackle RSS 2.0 Syntax with this tutorial. Also I'm only going into the basics of RSS. This tutorial is NOT meant to make you an expert in RSS Feeds and their capabilities.

The "brain" of an RSS Feed are the 'items'. For any RSS Feed to work it absolutely MUST contain at least one item. Your item is basically the content that you want people to link to. Simple right?

Within your item you will need 3 things. The title, link and description. The title and description should be exactly that. The title is the title of the content that you are syndicating. The description is a description of the title. Anyone confused yet? If you are, not to worry. Keep reading! It gets simpler. The link is whatever you want it to be. A link back to the origin of the feed normally. (Your site)

Ok, now that we got that outta the way, lets get down to the nitty gritty of building our feed.
First things first. Open a text editor (Notepad, Wordpad, etc.) -- any will work.

Maybe you want to syndicate your own "Verse of the day" or "Quote of the day" feed. Lets take the quote of the day idea and build our feed around that idea.

Here's our example quote that we will use for this feed...

"Jesus loves you just the way you are, but he doesn't want to leave you that way" - Max Lucado

Now lets lay out the parts of our item.. Title, Description and followed by the link.

Quote of the day
"Jesus loves you just the way you are, but he doesn't want to leave you that way" - Max Lucado
http://www.yourdomain.com

Type these 3 parts out in your text editor if you haven't already. I'll wait. *waits patiently* You ready? Yes? Ok, lets move on!

Ok now that we have our 3 parts laid out we need to put our tags around them. First is our Title. RSS Tags are much like HTML tags. They work the same way. You need an opening tag before the content and a closing tag immediately following the content. In this case our opening tag is

<TITLE> followed by our title (Quote of the day) and then our title is followed by our closing tag </TITLE>. It should look like this...
<TITLE>Quote of the day</TITLE>

Next is our Description. This tag works exactly the same way as our title tags. Our opening tag, <DESCRIPTION>, our content followed by our closing tag </DESCRIPTION>. It should look like this...
<DESCRIPTION>"Jesus loves you just the way you are, but he doesn't want to leave you that way." - Max Lucado</DESCRIPTION>

Next comes our link. Again this tag works the same as the title and description tags. Our opening tag <LINK> our actual link followed by our closing tag </LINK>. It should look like this...
<LINK>http://www.yourdomain.com</LINK>

You still with me? Good! So far our page should look like this...

<TITLE>Quote of the day</TITLE>
<DESCRIPTION>"Jesus loves you just the way you are, but he doesn't want to leave you that way." - Max Lucado</DESCRIPTION>
<LINK>http://www.yourdomain.com</LINK>

Now that we have the "guts" of our item we need to actually make it an item. Now, how do you think we do that? RIGHT!! We put it within <ITEM></ITEM> tags. You guys are so smart!!
So now our page should look like this...

<ITEM>
<TITLE>Quote of the day</TITLE>
<DESCRIPTION>"Jesus loves you just the way you are, but he doesn't want to leave you that way." - Max Lucado</DESCRIPTION>
<LINK>http://www.yourdomain.com/qotd.html</LINK>
</ITEM>

Awesome!! Now you've created your first actual "Item". Give yourself a high five or something. Make sure no one is watching though. They might think you've lost your mind. hehe

Ok now that we've got our first item created we need to make this item a channel. We do this in the same way as we did our item and with the exact same tags. Basically these tags define and describe what our item actually is. Did that make sense? Lets get to it...

You still have that text editor open right? With our item still in there? Good.

At the top of the file we need the same 3 tags...
<TITLE></TITLE>
</DESCRIPTION></DESCRIPTION>
<LINK></LINK>

Our Title is going to be a "Provided By" type thing. Something like this...
<TITLE>QOTD Provided by: Your site name here</TITLE>

Our Description is going to be a brief description of our site (remember you want this feed to spark interest and bring traffic to your site) Something like this...
<DESCRIPTION>At <insert site name here> you can find tons of quotes just like this one. Give us a visit!!</DESCRIPTION>

Now our link is going to be just that. A link back to our site.
<LINK>http://www.yourdomain.com</LINK>

Now your page should look like this...

<TITLE>QOTD Provided by: Your site name here</TITLE>
<DESCRIPTION>At <insert site name here> you can find tons of quotes just like this one. Give us a visit!!</DESCRIPTION>
<LINK>http://www.yourdomain.com</LINK>
<ITEM>
<TITLE>Quote of the day</TITLE>
<DESCRIPTION>"Jesus loves you just the way you are, but he doesn't want to leave you that way." - Max Lucado</DESCRIPTION>
<LINK>http://www.yourdomain.com</LINK>
</ITEM>

You'll notice that our channel tags at the top are NOT surrounded by the <ITEM></ITEM> tags. That's simply so they are seen as channel tags and not item tags.

Now we need define all this as a "Channel". We do that by surrounding all of it with <CHANNEL></CHANNEL> tags. So now our file looks like this...

<CHANNEL>
<TITLE>QOTD Provided by: Your site name here</TITLE>
<DESCRIPTION>At <insert site name here> you can find tons of quotes just like this one. Give us a visit!!</DESCRIPTION>
<LINK>http://www.yourdomain.com</LINK>
<ITEM>
<TITLE>Quote of the day</TITLE>
<DESCRIPTION>"Jesus loves you just the way you are, but he doesn't want to leave you that way." - Max Lucado</DESCRIPTION>
<LINK>http://www.yourdomain.com</LINK>
</ITEM>
</CHANNEL>

We're almost done but there is just a couple more small things we need to do. Since the tags we are using in our feed are XML 1.0 specified tags we need to define that at the top of our file. That will look like this...
<?xml version="1.0"?>

We also need to define the RSS Specifications we are meeting with our file. As I said earlier we are using RSS 2.0 syntax so we need to define that with an RSS tag. Like this...
<RSS version="2.0">

At the end of our file following the </CHANNEL> tag we need to close our <RSS version="2.0"> tag with our closing tag </RSS>

So now our completed file looks like this...
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<RSS version="2.0">
<CHANNEL>
<TITLE>QOTD Provided by: Your site name here</TITLE>
<DESCRIPTION>At <insert site name here> you can find tons of quotes just like this one. Give us a visit!!</DESCRIPTION>
<LINK>http://www.yourdomain.com</LINK>
<ITEM>
<TITLE>Quote of the day</TITLE>
<DESCRIPTION>"Jesus loves you just the way you are, but he doesn't want to leave you that way." - Max Lucado</DESCRIPTION>
<LINK>http://www.yourdomain.com</LINK>
</ITEM>
</CHANNEL>
</RSS>

VOILA!! You've created your very first RSS Feed!!

Saving your RSS file

Since this file is actually a bunch of XML tags we're going to save it with a .xml extension. You can call it whatever you want but for the sake of simplicity we'll call it rssfeed.xml

If you're not sure how to save your file with the .xml extension because of course our text editors don't provide an .xml save option here's how.

1) Click file
2) Click "Save As"
3) Find the directory that you would like to save this file in.
4) Put the file name within quotes like this "rssfeed.xml"
5) Click "OK"

Finally!! We're done!! You've just completed creating your very first basic RSS Feed and saved it. As I said at the beginning of this tutorial, it isn't meant to make you an expert of creating RSS Feeds. It is just meant to provide you with very basic knowledge of how to create a basic validating RSS Feed. There is much more that you can do with these feeds that we haven't covered. It's up to you to do your research from here and further your knowledge. Have a great time with creating feeds and syndicating your content!!

Scott Powers
www.living2serve.netScott Powers aka livetoserve

Living2Serve Ministry Website
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Servanthood is a way of Life!!
Serve as Jesus did - Mark 10:45