RSS

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a format used to organise content which can then be published or sent to different data consumers. For simplicity we will assume our content to be an article. When converting our article into RSS 2.0 format (which is what we will focus on) we have to create an XML file (XML version 1.0) and add certain elements to it. Once this is done, our document is ready.

There are two main components of an RSS file, the channel and item. To understand these components we have to consider an example of a newspaper. It has several articles, some grouped under the sports section, some grouped under finance section and so on.

The RSS feed which publishes these news articles will have a channel named sports and each sport article will be an item under this channel and we will have a similar channel for finance and all other sections.

With this scenario in mind, lets create our very own RSS feed to publish articles. In the example below we will be publishing two articles under the sports section and one under finance by a magazine called Magazine100. This is how our overall RSS feed would look like:

<rss version="2.0">

<channel>                         

<title>Sports</title>

<link>http://www.magazine100.com/sports</link>

<description>Sports news by magazine100</description>

<item>                

<title>cricket updates</title>

<description>Here you can paste the entire article</description>                           

</item>

<item>                

<title>football updates</title>

<description>Here you can paste the entire article</description>                           

</item>              

</channel>

<channel>         

<title>Finance</title>

<link>http://www.magazine100.com/finance</link>

<description>Finance news by magazine100</description>

               

<item>                

<title>wall street updates</title>

<description>Here you can paste the entire article</description>                           

</item>

</channel>

</rss>

As you can see at the top level we have <rss version="2.0">. This is a mandatory attribute that specifies the version that this document conforms to.

We then have a channel which is described by the tags <title>, <link> and <description>. These tags are mandatory for each channel, however if we feel the need to describe our channel further, there are several additional tags that we can use. You can get a list of these tags from here.

After channel, we have an item tag which uses <title> and <description> to publish the content of an article. For an item, it is mandatory to have at least one of these two fields (title and description), and similar to a channel, an item can also be further described using optional tags. You can get a list of these tags from here.

The problem with an item is that you do not have a tag to attach pictures. However this can be done if we use the following html within the content of the "description" tag:

<img src="[location of image]" alt="[alternate text]" title="[title of image]" />.

This code will place the image within the content of our article and solve our biggest headache (at least for me it was).