Creating an RSS Feed

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and its a popular web feed mechanism for presenting the contents of your site to the Internet. RSS-aware programs from around the web will look at your website and perhaps use your RSS to display information and links from your website to their users. RSS is most popular with bloggers and is usually integrated automatically into their software and presentation. With my website its not so easy because jerryodom.com is a text based html site with no database for storing and organizing the data. The pages are simply here and presented for my visitors but being that I am a computer programmer I was quickly able to set-up an RSS feed generator for my website.

RSS Feed Generator = Simple. Site Organization = Not.

In order for me to organize my site so as to present different RSS feeds for the sections and to supply accurate information I had to do quite a bit of manual house keeping. My website is an on a whim product. When I feel like posting I simply create a new page and sometimes I make mistakes.(no title, description, screwy navigation.) So I wrote some quick perl to verify all of my available pages were going to be able to be added to an RSS feed. I was suprised at how some of my pages lacked basic elements that I know should always be a part of a web page if you want search engines and therefore people to find them. So in setting up to program my RSS feed I improved the quality of my website. Winning project already.

Creating a RSS Feed Generator

This was a fairly easy thing to do using the PERL programming language. I simply wrote a parser for my html pages to pull apart the vital information and present them in the common RSS schema as defined in the RSS 2.0 Specification. Within a matter of hours I was logging requests from rss feed readers out looking around the Internet for new information.