Setting a simple RSS feed
with Firefox and RSS Editor

Editing the file with the news

Among the numerous RSS feed editors (RSS builder, ssrss, Feededit...), I chose a Firefox extension: RSS Editor. This extension is not compatible with Firefox 3.0.

Once installed (use Firefox 2), we can find three options to open the editor in the Tools menu.

Choose the one you prefer.

First, we will create the file news.xml (we can use news.rss instead) and fill the Channel tab.

The Channel: the basic info about your feed

Title: the title of your feed. (here news)
Link: The URL to your HTML website. (here http://www.site.com)
Description: Phrase or sentence describing the channel, what your feed is about. (here this is a test)
Language: the allowable value of the language used. (here en)
Copyright notice: Copyright notice for content in the channel. (could be Copyright 2005, owner)
Managing Editor: if you don't fear SPAM, Email address for person responsible for editorial content. (could be D @ site.com)
Web Master: if you don't fear SPAM, Email address for person responsible for technical issues related to the channel. (could be D @ site.com)
Publication Date: The publication date for the content in the channel. (will be filled by RSS Editor but you can modify it)
Last Built Date: The last time the content of the channel changed. (will be filled by RSS Editor but you can modify it)
Channel Image: url, title and link for an image that can be displayed with the channel.

Then we will enter a message in the Items (Items/Insert) tab.

The Item: your text and a link to the full story.

A channel may contain any number of <item>s.

Title: the title of your story. (here test 1)
Link: The URL of the full story. (here http://www.site.com/site1.html)
Description: The item synopsis. (here test1)
Author: if you don't fear SPAM, Email address of the author of the item. (could be D @ site.com)
Category: Includes the item in one or more categories. (could be RSS)
GUID: A string that uniquely identifies the item. (will be filled by RSS Editor but you can generate one)
Publication Date: The publication date of the item. (will be filled by RSS Editor but you can modify it)
Comments URL: URL of a page for comments relating to the item. (could be http://www.site.com/comments.html)
Source: The RSS channel that the item came from.
Source feed URL: url of the previous sub-element.

The two icons ( icons ) will allow us to add or insert other news.

In a folder of the site (here in the root), we save the file news.xml (click here to look at its content).
This file is a minimum.
Its syntax can be verified with a validator.

Features of the latest updates:

Version 0.0.9 allows you to have all tags in RSS 2.0 (specifications), to hide less frequently used fields and asks you if you want to save before closing.

Version 0.0.9 also adds support of a single xml-stylesheet.
This option allows CSS to control the display of the xml file (news1.xml without stylesheet - news2.xml linked to the stylesheet rss.css) if you don't use any HTML tag in your text and if you accept the differences between Mozilla/Opera and MSIE parsing.

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Making the RSS feed accessible

So that the feed (here in the root) can be spotted by a browser and so that the extension Sage (or any other aggregator) can find and read it, we have to add in the <head> part the following line:

For a HTML file:
<link rel="alternate" title="test RSS"
  type="application/rss+xml" href="/news.xml">
For a XHTML file:
<link rel="alternate" title="test RSS"
  type="application/rss+xml" href="/news.xml" />

With Firefox, our RSS feed appears at the bottom of the screen with the title given in the HTML file:

With the extension Sage, we can read:

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Offering a HTML version with PHP

As few visitors actually use an RSS feed, we can generate a HTML version of the file: news.php.

The following script that I use allows me to fetch the news in the file news.xml and display them.
The routine accepts any HTML tag but won't verify the syntax. If necessary, it must be adapted to your needs.
The script could save the parsed version and, when called, compare its dates to the last published date of the feed and send the cached version if it is newer.

This routine supports version 0.0.8 of RSS Editor.

<?php $buffer=""; $fp=@fopen("/news.xml","r"); while ($b=@fgets($fp,1024)) { $buffer.=$b; } @fclose($fp); $patterns=array ( "/<title>/","/<pubDate>/","/<\/pubDate>/","/<lastBuildDate>/","/<\/lastBuildDate>/","/<\/(item|image)>/", "/<(link|comments)>/","/<\/dtnk>/","/<\/comments>/", "/<source url/","/<\/source>/", "/</","/>/","/&/","/<(item|channel|image)>/", "/<\/?(\?xml|item|rs|channe)[^>]+>|<(guid|\/?languag|\/?webMaste)[^>]+>[^>]+>/" ,"/(title|description|copyright|managingEditor|author|url|category)>/","/\n\n/","/></"); $replacements=array ( "<p class=\"title\">","<p><u>Date de publication :</u> ","</p>","<p><u>Dernière mise à jour :</u> ","</p></div>","</div>", "<a href=\"","\">Lien</a>","\">commentaires</a>", "<a href","</a>", "<",">","&","<div class=\"item\">", "", "p>","\n",">\n<" ); $buffer=preg_replace($patterns,$replacements,$buffer); ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>Version HTML du fil RSS</title> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="RSS editor"> <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <link rel="alternate" title="test RSS" type="application/rss+xml" href="/news.xml"> <style type="text/css">  </style> </head> <body> <div class="item"> <h1>Version HTML du fil RSS</h1> <?php echo $buffer; ?> </div> </body> </html>

The script

Reads the file news.xml and place its content in the variable $buffer (there should not be any memory problem if the feed is not too big).
Parses the XML to replaces the rss/xml tags by html tags in $buffer.
Sends to the browser a HTML file with the style you will have to adapt.
Inserts $buffer in the HTML file.

If there is no syntax error with the HTML tags of the xml file, no problem, the page will be correctly displayed with any browser.

As this page will be linked by one or more pages of the site, it will be indexed as any other page.

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With javascript

Setting a simple RSS feedwith Firefox and RSS Editor

Editing the file with the news

The Channel: the basic info about your feed

The Item: your text and a link to the full story.

Features of the latest updates:

Making the RSS feed accessible

Offering a HTML version with PHP

Setting a simple RSS feed
with Firefox and RSS Editor