Opinions of Peter Belmont
Speaking Truth to Power
| How to Create An RSS Feed for Your Own Web-Site |
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by Peter A. Belmont / 2016-04-03
I am a programmer, and this essay is a description of how I create(d) an RSS Feed for my own blog (123pab.com). It is, I suppose, principally a guide for programmers. Non-programmers presumably establish their web-sites as clients of services (“platforms”) such as Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress. What Is An RSS Feed? An RSS Feed is a mechanism by which the manager of the web-site creates [1] a frequently updated list of labeled links, similar to the list of links called “Recent Essays” on this page, top right. These links are each like the usual HTML links. In this essay, I call this list a ”link-list”. The “link-list” items point to web-pages relating to the web-site, often a list of recently added elements (such as photos or blog-postings);—which mechanism is [2] made available to a visitor to that web-site by allowing the visitor to establish—as a “bookmark” in the visitor’s own browser—a way to view the link-list automatically without explicitly visiting either the link-list itself or the web-site. The user may establish that bookmark by clicking on a link (”the RSS-link”) at the web-site usually signified by name (RSS) or by an RSS-Icon such as:  How A Visitor Uses An RSS-Feed When the visitor visits the web-site which presents an RSS-link, that visitor may left-click the RSS-link and thereby cause a dialog-box to appear. The business of this dialog-box is to permit the visitor to create in the visitor’s own browser a “bookmark” which links to the “link-list” for the web-site. The dialog-box asks the visitor what to call this new bookmark and where to put the new bookmark among the bookmarks already managed by the browser. When the visitor supplies the requested information and clicks the “subscribe” button, a bookmark of the specified name automatically appears in the designated place among the visitor’s browser’s bookmarks. When, later, the visitor allows the mouse-arrow to “hover” over the bookmark for the RSS Feed, a drop-down menu will appear which shows the then-curent “link-list” and the visitor may click on any link of this drop-down menu to jump to the designated web-page. How It Works The bookmark is essentially a link to a web-page which, when visited, produces (not HTML material as most web-pages do when invoked/visited but) an XML file (more on that below) which provides the contents of the link-list and “looks” like an RSS XML file. The browser knows which of the user’s bookmarks are RSS-Feed bookmarks. When the browser is opened, it visits the link-lists associated with the several RSS-Feed bookmarks, reads those lists, and saves them. Thereafter, the browser “refreshes” these (saved) link-lists on its own refresh-schedule or upon explicit demand by the user. When the user “hovers” over an RSS bookmark, the browser recovers its link-list and displays it. All of this happens without the user having to visit the web-site explicitly: the user may read the items descriptions on the link-list and decide which web-pages, if any, to visit (by left-clicking on a link). How The RSS Table Of Contents May Change The manager of the website must create a web-page written in a special language, XML, which has within it the data for a link-list: that is, it contains a list of {description, URL} pairs from which the visitor’s browser will create the drop-down menu for the “link-list”. This XML program may be changed at the whim of the manager of the web-site. Typically, this program (and the link-list it creates) is changed frequently—every time a new item of interest is to be added to the link-list. How To Code The RSS-Feed Icon The programmer for “the web-site” chooses a particular RSS-Icon from those available (gratis) on the internet, for instance: http://www.newsniche.com/rss.gifand also creates a web-page whose business is to produce the XML “link-list”, for example http://123pab.com/blogfeed.phpThe clickable link to the RSS facility—which sets up the bookmark in the visitor’s browser—is then the usual link: <a href=”http://123pab.com/blogfeed.php”><img src=”http://www.newsniche.com/rss.gif” width=”20” height=”20”></a>That’s the easy part. Code for the XML File The hard part—involving a bit of programming as a rule—is producing the XML file. I suppose it could be written “by hand” and uploaded (also “by hand”) to the web-site’s server, something like: blogfeed.xml: XML-file contents-written-out-by-handor blogfeed.php: <?phpWhat I did was different: I wrote a PHP program, blogfeed.php, to create my XML materials. When anyone (or anyone’s browser) visits my blogfeed.php, the PHP program runs on the server where my blog resides. When it runs, it interrogates my database to find the most recent blog entries and creates the XML text (including a link-list of those most-recent blog entries) and returns that XML text. (Most web-pages, when visited, return HTML text which browsers interpret to make visible web-page screens. The XML, in this case, is interpreted to make a link-list.) In either case, your text XML file, rssfeed.xml, (or, alternatively, your PHP program which returns an XML output, rssfeed.php) should produce a text like the following. Note that the example following—which works under Firefox and (I hope) works on other browsers—is a bit “tainted” by a rival and much more complicated coding standard, called “atom”. Readers with a desirte to get further into the differences between “atom” and “rss” might start their research here. What follows is very simple and “works for me”. <?xml version=”1.0”?> |
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