Although RSS feeds are commonly associated with blogs they are quite separate. See RSS and blogs for more detail.

 It is possible to create an RSS feed from almost any type of web content.

It is most commonly used for list type information were the reader is presented with a list of items and brief item descriptions.

They then can select the ones that they want more information about.

Common uses are:

• Auction Sites
• Article Sites
• Download sites
• Real estate.

I used to publish a feed of latest articles before I started my blog. And it is this feed that I will walk you through so as to demonstrate the principal.

An RSS feed is simply an XML file, just as a web page is an HTML file. If you look at a web page you will see this structure:

And an RSS feed/file looks like this

You should see from these examples how similar the structure is. If you need to add more items to your feed you simply create a new item tag that contains  title, link and description tags.

Now imagine I have a web page called latest-articles.htm and I want to create an RSS feed that lists these articles so that people can subscribe to the feed.

The file would look like this:

I have saved the file here as latest-articles.xml. you can open it in your browser but the browser just displays it as it is without trying to interpret the tags. But an RSS reader will display it correctly.

To see that just go to the latest latest-articles.htm and subscribe to the feed in your rss reader.

Web www.build-your-website.co.uk

Although it is possible to manually create an RSS feed it is not very common to do so. It is more common to use RSS feed creation software.

Related Articles and Resources

•  Feedburner -FeedBurner is a free RSS/Atom feed service that allows publishers to significantly enhance their feeds.

• Anatomy of a feed- My description above used the basic tags needed to create a working feed. There are others which are discussed in this article.