Feeds 101

Feeds. RSS. Atom. Syndication. Subscribers. These are some of the keywords floating around the web and have gained notorious prominence over the years. In this guide, we’ll take a look at a number of things including what feeds are, why you need to have a feed for your site, how to set up one and then publish it.

What are Feeds?

In this digital age, users no longer have the luxury of time to check for new content manually each time or more importantly remember each site they want to get information from. Web feeds, news feeds or feeds helps the user simplify this process drastically.

Feeds, to put it simply, are a way to publish frequently updated content. Your feed is a XML formatted document which lets you share content with other users on the web. Users, subscribers in this lingo, can use your feed to read updated information on your site if and when it is posted.

Why you Should Publish Feeds

From a web developer’s perspective, one of the main reason for publishing a feed is user convenience. With a feed for users to subscribe to, they don’t have to check for new content manually each time. They can just subscribe to your feed and get notified new content is posted. No hassles! If you fear you’ll lose your advertisement revenues in this process, you can just as easily include ads in the feed.

Publishing a feed also means that it is easier for third party content providers to syndicate your content thus gaining more exposure and traffic in the process.

Feed Formats

As with any hot technology, there are a few well established, competing protocols for creating web feeds.

RSS

RSS is the dominant format for publishing web feeds and stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS has a number of variants each branching out from RSS 1.x and RSS 2.x versions. A lot of services, including WordPress use RSS for creating its feeds.

Despite it’s massive user base, RSS does suffer from some drawbacks, some significant, the most important one being its inability to handle HTML. Nevertheless, we’ll be creating our feed today in the RSS format.

Atom

Atom was created in order to mitigate a lot of RSS’ drawbacks including the ability to include properly formatted XML or XHTML in your feeds. But since RSS has almost become synonymous with feeds, Atom has always been the much more feature rich and flexible little brother.

RSS’s Format

In the interest of keeping it simple, we’ll just stick with RSS today instead of trying out each format out there.

Each and every RSS feed out there follows this general format:

Defining the version and encoding

RSS is a subset of XML which means we need to make sure it is marked so appropriately.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"> 
.. 
</rss>

The first line is the XML declaration. We define the version so that it validates correctly as XML. The encoding part is purely optional.

The second line defines the version of RSS we are going to use today. We are going to use RSS 2 today.

Each feed need to be inside a channel so that goes inside the markup. Thus far our feed looks like so.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"> 
<channel>
.. 
</channel>
</rss>

Filling in the feed’s source information

This is where you fill in all the important details like the name of the feed, the URL and a description of the site.

<title>My feed</title>
 <link>http://www.somesite.com</link>
 <description>Random ravings :)</description>

You aren’t limited to these fields alone. There are a number of other optional fields including the language of your feed, an image for the logo, when the feed was updated last and many more.

Adding the content

Each item in the feed has to be enclosed by an <item> element. An item can be anything: a news post, a status update, new products: anything. Each item requires a title and a corresponding link. As with before, you can make use of a number of optional elements including description and author fields.

A sample item would look like so:

<item>
<title>Feeds 101</title>
 <link>http://www.net.tutsplus.com</link>
 <description>Let's create an RSS feed from scratch!</description>
 <author>Siddharth</author>
</item>

Building a Static RSS Feed

Now that we know all the individual parts of a RSS file and how they all gel together, it’s time to see a complete RSS file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"> 
<channel>
	<title>My feed</title>
   <link>http://www.somesite.com</link>
   <description>Random ravings :)</description>
   <item>
		<title>Feeds 101</title>
 		<link>http://www.net.tutsplus.com</link>
 		<description>Let's create an RSS feed from scratch!</description>
 		<author>sid@ssiddharth.com</author>
	</item>
</channel>
</rss>

It may not look like much but gents, this is a working RSS feed. We’ve defined everything that needs to be defined and if you are inclined to do so, you can put this on the web.

Building a Dynamic RSS Feed

Happy about building your first RSS feed? You should be! But the problem with this is that the feed is completely static: something which is completely counter intuitive as compared to the concept of feeds. We’ll rectify this now by building a simple PHP script that mooches off data from a database and updates the RSS feed when needed.

Since I like having pretty URLs, I am going to name this file index.php and place it in a folder called feed so my feed can be accessed at www.mysite.com/feed

For the sake of simplicity, I am going to assume you already have a database containing your articles. I am also assuming the database has columns named title>, link, description and date in a table called posts.

Building the base

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"> 
<channel>
	<title>My feed</title>
   <link>http://www.somesite.com</link>
   <description>Random ravings :)</description>

 <?php
    // Code here
 ?>

</channel>
</rss>

Since the XML declarations and feed information are going to be pretty static, we’ll keep them static. You’d want to keep them dynamic if you were writing a PHP class for generating RSS feeds but for our purposes, this should do.

Defining database information and connecting

DEFINE ('DB_USER', 'some_username');  
DEFINE ('DB_PASSWORD', 'some_unusually_weak_password');  
DEFINE ('DB_HOST', 'localhost');  
DEFINE ('DB_NAME', 'database'); 

Simple as it looks. We just note down a bunch of information for use later.

$connection = mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD) or 
die('Connection to the specified database couldn't be established');  
mysql_select_db(DB_NAME)  or 
die ('Specified database couldn't be selected');  

Pretty generic connection code. We try to connect using the credentials noted earlier. If nothing hitches up, we select the relevant database for use later.

Querying the database

$query = "SELECT * FROM posts ORDER BY date DESC";  
$result = mysql_query($query) or die ("Query couldn't be executed");  

This isn’t really a SQL oriented tutorial and so I’ll skim over it. We just grab all the posts from the table so that we can add it to the feed. Nothing else fancy going on over there.

Populating the items list

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC) {
echo '<item>
		 <title>'.$row['title'].'</title>
		 <link>'.$row['link'].'</link>
		 <description>'.$row['description'].'</description>
	   </item>';
}

We grab each individual record and then print it inside the relevant element to create the items list. Note that since I wanted a hash to work with I set the result type to MYSQL_ASSOC.

And with that the PHP part is done. The complete code should look like below.

 <?php
     header("Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8");  
 ?>
 
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <rss version="2.0"> 
 <channel>
	<title>My feed</title>
   <link>http://www.somesite.com</link>
   <description>Random ravings :)</description>

 <?php
    DEFINE ('DB_USER', 'some_username');  
	 DEFINE ('DB_PASSWORD', 'some_unusually_weak_password');  
	 DEFINE ('DB_HOST', 'localhost');  
	 DEFINE ('DB_NAME', 'database'); 

	 $connection = mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD) or 
	 die('Connection to the specified database couldn't be established');  
	 mysql_select_db(DB_NAME)  or 
	 die ('Specified database couldn't be selected');  

	 $query = "SELECT * FROM posts ORDER BY date DESC";  
	 $result = mysql_query($query) or die ("Query couldn't be executed");  

	 while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC) {
		echo '<item>
			 	<title>'.$row['title'].'</title>
		 		<link>'.$row['link'].'</link>
		 		<description>'.$row['description'].'</description>
	  	 	  </item>';
	 }
 ?>

 </channel>
 </rss>

You should now be able to access your feed at www.yoursite.com/feed.

Validate your Feed

Just like with xHTML, RSS/XML needs to be well-formed and without errors. There are a number of validators to help you with this. Here are some of my often used ones.

• W3C’S Validator
• Feed Validator
• RSS Board’s Validator

Since RSS can only handle escaped HTML, make sure you use &lt; lt; for < and &lt; gt; for > respectively. Also make sure you replace special characters to their respective HTML codes. Forgetting to do so will probably result in invalid markup and break the feed.

All Done! Publish that Feed

Now that we’ve created the feed and made sure it validates, we can now go publish it. You can use a service like Feedburner to manage your feeds. This lets you glean a lot of information including how many subscribers you have. Or you can take the easy way out and just link to your feed on your site.

Have you ever noticed the feed icon on your browser lighting up for certain pages alone? This means the browser has been notified that a feed of the current page is available for subscription. In order for the user’s browser to automatically detect the feed’s presence you need to add this small snippet to the head section of your page:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Article RSS Feed" 
href="http://www.yoursite.com/feed" />

You need not limit yourself to one feed. You may have a feed for each author or a feed for each category of the products you sell. Feel free to add as many feeds you want to the head section.

Conclusion

And that brings us to an end to this joy ride. We’ve gone over what feeds are, what purpose they serve and the different formats available. Next we looked at RSS, its skeleton structure and then learned how to create a simple dynamic RSS feed. Hopefully you’ve found this tutorial interesting and this has been useful to you.

Questions? Nice things to say? Criticisms? Hit the comments section and leave me a comment. Happy coding!

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