Re: creating rss feeds - how do u do it?

For future reference, this mailing list is really only meant for RSS 1.0 
related discussions. Since your feeds are using RSS 2.0 (which is a 
substantially different format) you'd probably be better off asking any 
future questions on an RSS 2.0 mailing list 
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RSS2-Support/ is one example).

>I have been hand coding html pages for 8 or 9 years now. I prefer to
> hand code, because I am a programmer by nature, and it allows me to
> better understand what I am doing (and it helps me to keep the code
> clean cut).

If you are going to be hand coding RSS you should make absolutely sure that 
you know the specifications inside out (both RSS and XML). It's very easy to 
make a mistake with these things. To help with that, I'd strongly recommend 
you run your feeds through the feed validator (www.feedvalidator.org) on a 
regular basis.

For a start, you'll notice that your dates aren't valid (UTC isn't a valid 
timezone in RFC822). Also (although the validator doesn't catch this) your 
image url is pointing to an icon file (according to the spec it should be a 
gif, jpeg or png).

And don't assume that one you've got it validated you can stop checking. 
It's very easy for a foreign character or a stray ampersand to slip into a 
description somewhere and mess everything up.

> The content in each of these files could be grabbed using PHP. Can I
> use PHP to create a rss file? The file would then have a php extension
> - would that cause problems for rss readers?

This shouldn't be a problem. RSS readers shouldn't care what the file 
extension is.

Regards
James


 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    [email protected]

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/