Manually Creating An RSS Feed

Anyone who publishes an RSS feed on their blog should know what their RSS feed actually looks like. Here is a quick rundown of the various parts of a simple feed.

Definition

The beginning of the RSS feed defines what the file is, in this case it is an XML RSS feed.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rss version="2.0">

That is easy enough, isn’t it?

Channel Information

The next part is the channel, which basically tells us the meta information for the feed like the description and title. The channel is also where all of the actual feed content is defined as well (next section).

<channel>
<title>My Feed</title>
<description>A cool feed</description>
<link>http://www.example.com</link>

Item

Finally we get to deal with each individual entry for the feed. All of the sections are pretty self explanatory, so I won’t be going over them.

<item>
<title>A post</title>
<link>http://www.example.com/post/</link>
<description>This is just a post, do you like it?</description>
<pubDate> Sat, January 5, 2029 11:59:34 EST</pubDate>
</item>

<item>
<title>Another post</title>
<link>http://www.example.com/anotherpost/</link>
<description>This is just another post, do you like it?</description>
<pubDate> Sat, January 5, 2023 11:59:34 EST</pubDate>
</item>

End Tags

Now we need to close off the tags for the feed, and it will be complete!

</channel>
</rss>

Writing It

The posts for the feed should be in reverse chronological order, meaning newer posts are inserted at the top, and older ones are pushed down.

RSS feeds can be made in practically any text editor which can save plain text files. The file can end in .xml or .rss.

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