Setting up RSS feeds – The Industrious Squirrel

I recently added RSS feeds to darkinfinitysoftware.com so that people could keep up to date with what our company is doing, and get notified when we have new or updated software.

There are lots of ways to setup an RSS feed. For example, this blog is in WordPress and WordPress sets up RSS feeds automatically. There are also computer programs and web apps that will manage your RSS feed.

I set it up manually for Dark Infinity, so I thought I would give the steps here.

First of all, RSS is really just an XML file on the web that you update when you post new content. Here is what the XML looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Dark Infinity Software</title>
    <description>News from Dark Infinity Software</description>
    <atom:link href="http://darkinfinitysofware.com/news.rss" rel="self"
      type="application/rss+xml"/>
    <link>http://darkinfinitysoftware.com</link>
    <lastBuildDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000</lastBuildDate>
    <language>en-US</language>
    <sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
    <sy:updateFrequency>12</sy:updateFrequency>
    <item>
      <title>New free games!</title>
      <pubDate>05 Mar 2015 00:00:00</pubDate>
      <link>http://darkinfinitysoftware.com/</link>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[
        DISC is proud to release several new freeware games: 20 Questions Wrong, Egyptian Ratslap, High Score and Race to Klondike 5!. There is also a brand new version of Pair Soup with two new tile sets and a match-3 mode. We are also releasing a free full-screen launcher to keep track of all your games!
        ]]></content:encoded>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Whenever you have new content to publish, you simply add a new <item> element to this file and update the <lastBuildDate> element. Once this XML file is online (it should have a .xml extension), you can point any RSS reader to the full URL of the file.

To make it easier for the average user, you should also add a <link> element to your website’s html.

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Dark Infinity Software" href="http://darkinfinitysoftware.com/software.xml">

This will tell browser plugins that there is an RSS feed available for this page. It also allows people to simply put the URL of your website into their RSS reader instead of the full URL to the feed.xml file.

Finally, you should add a link somewhere on your site to your feed.xml file and use the standard RSS image. The html looks like this:

And here is a link to download the image:

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