An RSS news feed can be used to communicate with your target audience. It is an perfect indicates of notifying people of new content material on your website without the require for them to maintain on visiting your site. You can send newsletters to your readership without having to use e-mail and risk being accused of spamming. You will be comfy in the knowledge that people who request your feed are actually interested in it simply because they have actively subscribed to it. This write-up will clarify just how to produce your own RSS news feed.

There are a couple of methods to produce an RSS file, you can use an editor created for the objective or you can produce a file utilizing a easy text editor. The latter will require you to learn some XML while the former will do the tough part for you. First off I will explain an RSS file, there are several variations and I will be showing you edition 2., the latest RSS edition.

An RSS file looks just like an HTML file other than it has various tags and the files end in .rss or .xml instead than .html. The file is made up of header information and item information, the item information contains the real news items.

The first section of the file contains the header information. This states that the file is XML and which edition, the encoding used and the edition of RSS that you are utilizing. This part of the file is obligatory. Next up is the channel tag, this encloses the entire of the relaxation of the file. This is followed by a title, description and link which clarify the what the feed is about and what website it is linked with. The final part of the header is the optional image information. If you use this the software program that is used to parse or read your file can show a small picture this kind of as a logo.

Please be aware that in these examples I have used square brackets instead of angled brackets.

[?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?]
[rss version="2.0"]
[channel]
[title]The Widget news feed[/title]
[description]The latest news on widgets[/description]
[link]http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[image]
[title]Widget News[/title]
[url>http://www.widget.com/widget.gif[/url]
[link>http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[/image]

The body of the file is made up of the news items. Each news item is enclosed in the item tag and comprises of a title, a description and a published date. The date needs to be in the format proven in the instance beneath.

[title]Which is the best Widget to?[/title]
[description]In this write-up we discuss the launch of several new widgets, but which is the best widget.[/description]
[pubDate]Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:fifty GMT[/pubDate]
[link]http://www.widget.com/the-best-widgets.html[/link]
[/item]

You can have as numerous items in the feed as you like but numerous webmasters just show the ten most recent items to maintain the bandwidth use down and also so not to overwhelm the end consumer with as well numerous items.

Finally the file is ended with the closing channel tag and a closing RSS tag.

[/channel]
[/rss]

I have coated the fundamental tags to produce an RSS file, there are other tags that can be used and these are explained in the http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss (RSS 2.) specification.

Once you have produced your file you will require to confirm it is ok, to do this upload the file to your server and then go to this validator to validate the file. Your file is now ready. Now anybody can subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to your RSS file.

That is the basics coated. I will be covering other areas in long term content articles as there is far as well a lot information to match into a single write-up.

Allan is the webmaster at http://www.newsniche.com an RSS resource for webmasters. Discover how to use RSS to attract and retain guests to your site.