RSS 2.0 / Atom 1.0 Feed (Please)

melchett · Post by **melchett** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 7:39 pm

Any chance you could include an RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0 feed on your news page? I think that'd be a GREAT and really useful addition to your site

Post by **Arcadian** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 12:56 am

To be honest I didn't know much about RSS until about an hour ago, but I've just downloaded a viewer and a creator and have managed to come up with this:
http://www.stairwaytohell.com/news/rss.xml

Is this the sort of thing you're talking about?

As far as keeping it updated goes ... I'll mention it on the newspage when I next update and if there's sufficient interest, I'll consider it.

melchett · Post by **melchett** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:13 pm

Yes, just perfect - exactly what I was looking for. I didn't quite expect you to implement it so quickly though

If you use a web browser (such as Mozilla Firefox) that supports "Live Bookmarks" then you can just click on the bookmarked icon and see the current set of news articles. I don't know if you have to pay excessive amounts for the bandwidth to your site but an RSS newsfeed should reduce the traffic to your site as checking the actual news page will cause a browser to load e.g. the frameset, all the graphics, the page itself etc (yeah, they can be cached in the browser though). With the news feed it should just be one web server hit.

I think Internet Explorer version 7 will also support RSS feeds although hopefully no one will install it

If you put the following at in the <head></head> section of the news page then browsers / other web tools should auto-detect that you have a news feed and offer it to end users:

Code: Select all

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Stairway To Hell RSS Feed" href="http://www.stairwaytohell.com/news/rss.xml" />

Many thanks for doing this and apologies if I have created more work for you!

melchett · Post by **melchett** » Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:33 pm

Also meant to say that if you use the web a lot and haven't found a good RSS News Feed Aggregator then I quite liked the following site:

http://www.netvibes.com

The site is a "mini-portal" and can be used for aggregating (well, sort of) news feeds - it's a great place to try out your new Stairway to Hell news feed if you want to see how it works (use Add Feed in the top left hand corner, add the URL to the "RSS/ATOM feed link" box and then add it to the page.

melchett · Post by **melchett** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 9:43 pm

Sorry to hear you decided to kill the RSS feed. Sad fact is probably that most people are still using Internet Explorer and hence don't have an in-built capability to support it? When IE7 (Firefox/Mozilla clone) is finally released it will have built-in RSS/Atom support and I think you'll notice a significant uptake of the technology. Maybe you'll re-instate it then when it becomes part of what Microsoft tells the world it's ok to use? (sorry to sound cynical). Out of curiosity, do you know how many hits you got for the rss.xml page?

I used it and I'm certainly going to miss it.

Also, hey, doesn't my original email to you about this count as a "single email of support"?

mjforbes · Post by **mjforbes** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 2:01 pm

Ah - so that's why my feed appeared to have died! I thought that there was something wrong with my Thunderbird configuration.

I've been using IE7 on and off for a while, and despite the fact that it's a huge improvement on IE6, I think I'll be sticking with Firefox. I know that IE7 is still in Beta, but Ffox just seems to be more "polished".

Regards

Matt

jon28 · Post by **jon28** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 12:59 pm

Whilst it has been around a while RSS is still more of a techie type technology. Sure a lot of people use it, but it hasn't hit the mainstream yet.

It should do though as Microsoft are planning big support for it. Some of the things that you could do with RSS are pretty amazing. Of course I can't remember any examples off the top of my head, but there was an interesting article I read on it which talked about the potential.

Post by **Arcadian** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 2:59 am

So now you tell me!

Hmm ... the app I was using to create the feeds has expired now anyway (it was only a 30 day trial) ... does anyone know of a freeware tool for creating RSS feeds?

Post by **Samwise** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 2:40 pm

I did mail about this - I too was using the RSS feed and would love to see it return permanently.

A couple of links to freebie RSS creator tools:

http://www.usablelabs.com/productFeedSpring.html
http://www.rsspublisher.com/

Also, there's a few online services which work without you installing software, such as:

http://www.rssfeedssubmit.com/rss-generator/

Would love to see it come back!

Sam.