How--and why--to get started - PHP

You should know that there are a lot of tutorials and the like on how to add RSS content to your own site.  An excellent one can be found at: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Plugging-RDF-Content-Into-Your-Web-Site-With-PHP.

Additionally, there are a wide range of tools to make adding RSS to your site easy with hardly writing any code of you own. I personally use the MagpieRSS toolset created in PHP which can be found at http://magpierss.sourceforge.net. So instead of covering how to get RSS added to your site, what I’d like to do is talk about how you can build your own RSS feed.

Some webmasters that I know groan over the thought of RSS. It’s yet another new technology to learn, another new thing to add to their site and manage. The thing is, RSS is really nothing more than an XML application, and if done right, it doesn’t need any management.  Everything can be (indeed, should be) automated. 

In fact, RSS it is the first widespread use of XML. It is the first time XML is being used to do something useful for the average Web surfer AND for the average webmaster.

To start with, the easiest thing to do will be to take a look at what an RSS file looks like. You can see an example RSS file at: http://www.wolfdatasystems.com/rss.xml

To anyone with any knowledge of HTML it isn’t really hard to figure out what is going on.  There isn’t anything strange or scary, there isn’t anything to make you cringe.