Distribution: How To Make Your Own RSS Feed

An rss feed stands for really simple syndication. This type of feed is effective if you have a website or blog. Basically a subscriber will choose to receive the live feed from your website. Their browser will receive real time information that is posted through your feed. This type of feed is particularly good for sports, news, entertainment and blogs. It is possible to provide information to subscribers even when they are not on your website.

Step 1. Software

There is plenty of software available that can help with the RSS feed. Look for a media company that offers RSS feed tools.  Most software is very affordable and is easily upgradeable should you advance beyond the basics of the program.

Step 2. Starting Information

The FTP server type and your website server address is needed to start the feed. For those with an in-house server, this can easily be found by asking the companies IT guys. However, if you use an outside server then you will need to contact the hosting company for this information. If your hosting does not have FTP support then it will be necessary to upgrade your hosting.

Step 3. Title, Description and Link

The feed will need a title. The best step is to use your website name. After the title, a description is needed that will provide details on what is in the feed. A link directly to the feed is necessary as this is the URL that originates the feed. With software, this is very easy but if you are doing this without software then you will need to know a decent amount of programming code.

Step 4. Items

The items are really the heart of the feed. Each of the feed files will contain at least 1 item. Most of the time these items are web pages that are linked to the information. It is not necessary for the title information to match the title tag of the website but using the title tag makes it easy to copy information. This information will be surrounded with XML tags. RSS will have its own XML tags and are easy to use if used correctly.

Step 5. Multiple Elements

It is easy to set up an RSS feed with multiple elements. Once you have built one item, simply do the same thing with your remaining elements. New items and elements will appear at the top with the older items at the bottom.

Step 6. Distribution

Once the site has been built, distribution is the next step. The site is generally defined as a channel that will use all of the tags that were constructed in the previous steps. However, the information in the channel deals with the entire website and not just the specific content pages. Channel information does not contain any <and> tags which differentiates the channel from the items.

Step 7. Initial Tags

A tag is required at the very beginning that the feed was created using the correct specifications. These specifications will depend on the software and website for your feed. By matching specifications it is possible to add other features in the future.