Please DO Feed the Sites: IntroductionIt's been pointed out to me recently, and rightly so, that although I've been telling everyone how important it is to have and promote and use RSS feeds for their sites, I haven't stopped to explain anything about how one would actually go about doing that. Personally, I recommend the use of RSS Pixy Dust, but, if you don't happen to have that available, it gets a little more complicated.I've decided that the best way to provide a useful explanation that will satisfy the most people is to break the whole thing up into a series of articles that I'm calling “Please DO Feed the Sites.” In this way, people can look for the parts they need, and, if I should miss something, I can just tag it on later as an extra part. Currently, I have it planned as follows: * Part 1: Introduction (You're reading it now.) * Part 2: What Is RSS? * Part 3: Creating Outgoing Feeds * Part 4: Using Incoming Feeds If I can get the time (and there's enough interest,) I will continue the series by showing you the creation of a hand-coded and maintained RSS feed which may be a possible working solution for some sites. I will also try to move on to a walkthrough demonstration showing the creation of database-driven, dynamically maintained and updated RSS feeds. I may also add other parts later. |