2.6.1. Creating Feeds

If you maintain a blog, it's likely that you are already publishing a syndication feed (whether or not you are aware of it). Check your blog templates to see if there is a template for an index.xml, index.rdf, or atom.xml file. If so, have a look at the root directory for your blog. Voila! You'll probably find a syndication feed. You may want to tweak the template tags to make sure that you are syndicating the content you want, and only the content you want.

Once you've syndicated content, anyone can use it and even build a web site of their own around your content, and there's not much you can do about it.

If you don't have a blog feed, or want to publish content other than the entries of your blog, it's easy to construct an XML syndication feed by hand using a text editor. For example, here's a portion of an RSS syndication feed I created by hand:

The key thing to notice about this feed is that it consists of items. You can tell because each one is wrapped in tags. Within the item, you'll find some kind of description and/or content and a link to the full content provided by the item, as indicated by tags such as and .

You can see that it isn't very hard to create syndication feeds manually just by mimicking the form of the thing and adding your own data as items with links. But this will quickly get cumbersome if you are creating feeds that get updated frequently.

Fortunately, there are also a great many tools available to help you construct your own feeds. Some tools use a Wizard interface, so you don't need to know anything about coding in XML to create a syndication feed.

You'll find links to these tools and to syndication resources in general on the RSS Compendium , online at http://allrss.com/, and http://www.xml.com/pub/rg/RSS_Software.

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