Creating a RSS Feed for my visitors

[Barney McGrew]

I am currently rewriting my site and wish to include a RSS page if possible. The page will simply inform people that a particular county within the UK are recruitng for FFs.

How hard are they to create and will I need anything special in terms of skills or applications to create one.

I am currently rewriting the whole site in XHTML (Yes, the dreaded tables have gone) which I believe is a bonus.

[sarahA]

This is the site I first used to learn it - http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html

An RSS file, to be dynamic, needs to be written with a server side language. You can either overwrite a file called whatever.xml for example, or you can simply offer a PHP/ASP file as an RSS file and just change the header to output the file as XML. The each item is just built using your script just like a list of results would be built.

[Barney McGrew]

Cheers Sarah, I will look into that.

[Barney McGrew]

I basically just changed the text within this xml file to creat this http://www.fireservice.co.uk/recruit.xml

Is it just a simple case of altering this xml file and all those who have it listed within their feed software will see the changes once they are made.

Im pretty new to this bit, hence the questions.

[samhs]

Add a new <item> each time. Alter these each time:

      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2003 04:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <lastBuildDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2003 09:41:01 GMT</lastBuildDate>

hth

[sarahA]

Personally I just list the last X items. For example, take a blog feed. It usually has the last 10 items pulled dynamically from the database. So whenever someone requests it, it is dynamically generated there and then (well mine is!) and they will get the last 10 items. Feedreaders are designed to determine what's new and so only marks the new items as unread.

The change will of course show to the subscriber when their feedreader updates.