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An RSS feed is a special file that shares your website content and news.

Most of the time, RSS feed files are automatically generated by another program. For example, WordPress creates a RSS feed that can be accessed via the following URL, if you have installed WordPress in the default location:

http://www.example.com/wordpress/wp-feed.php

There's nothing special about an RSS feed file, and no server-specific configuration is required. The files behave just like normal text files on your website. If our servers can run the program that generates the feed in the first place, then they'll definitely support the feed itself.

Manually creating RSS feed files

As we mentioned, RSS feed files are usually created automatically by software programs. However, it's also possible to create RSS feeds yourself, or to write a script that generates the feed and keeps it up to date. To do this you will need to be familiar with HTML files and with a scripting language such as PHP or Perl if you choose to use one. If you feel comfortable with that, the rest of this page explains more.

The RSS feed file may have any name. For instance my-feed.php and my-feed.html are both valid names, as long as the contents of the URL have the correct RSS tag structure when viewed in a Web browser. So you could write a text file containing the RSS tags, or write a PHP scripts that generates them.

You can create as many RSS feeds as you like and put them anywhere on your website. Each one can contain up to 15 items, and each item represents something that you want to share.

The following is a very simple example of an RSS feed and the basic tag structure:

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

<channel>

<title>Album Reviews</title>
<description>In this section we review popular albums...</description>
<link>http://example.com/reviews/</link>

<item>
<title>Album1</title>
<description>Description for Album1 </description>
<link>http://example.com/reviews/album1.html</link>
</item>

<item>
<title>Album2</title>
<description>Description for Album2 </description>
<link>http://example.com/reviews/album2.html</link>
</item>

</channel>

</rss>

Getting more information

To learn more about RSS feeds and how to create them, just do a Web search for "create an RSS feed". You'll find plenty of excellent tutorials.

Two particularly helpful pages are:

• RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters (which also explains how to make the "RSS" logo light up for modern browsers)
• SearchEngineWatch