Have you ever noticed those inviting orange buttons on some web pages, or spotted the odd link pitching an “RSS feed”? If you’ve ever clicked one out of curiosity, and then scratched your head at the unformatted gobbledygook in your web browser, you’ve seen an RSS file.

What is it really for, anyway? Two things: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom are two specialized formats that create what’s commonly called a news feed, or just feed. A feed is an easy way for sites to share headlines and stories so that you can read them without having to visit two dozen different web pages everyday.

In other words, web builders use feeds to dish out fresh news and content from their websites and web surfers can use feed applications to collect custom-tailored selections of their favorite websites to be read at their leisure.

What we’ll cover

Because there are several different formats — RSS and Atom are the main ones — we’ll simple refer to them as feeds.

The idea of feeds — pushing out your content to users, rather than forcing them to visit your site — gained traction among developers years ago, in part because they’re really easy to code and even simpler to share.

This brief how-to will get you started on the road to feed consuming nirvana and we’ll also take a quick look at creating your own no-frills RSS feed – one you can build for your site in just a few minutes.

Consuming feeds

Feed reading apps bring a wide selection of bespoke news to your desktop without requiring you to wade through links and bookmarks. Generally free of layout code, heavy graphics, and advertising, RSS feeds download quickly. Plus, RSS uses simple code, so it’s available no matter what kind of device you’re using. For example, I often lack access to telephone lines when I’m on the road, so I use my Bluetooth cellular modem and NetNewsWire to keep in touch with my favorite sites.

Most modern web browsers offer a built in feed reader with varying features. Although browser-based feed readers may not be the most sophisticated way to read your favorite sites’ feeds, they make a simple place to start.

When you click on one of those lovely little orange icons in Firefox, Safari, Opera or IE7 you’ll likely find yourself starring at a somewhat raw looking page that shows all the headlines, publication dates and short summaries of stories that the site has recently published.

That, in a nutshell, is your feed. If you add this feed to your browser’s feed section (often referred to as “live bookmarks” you can return tomorrow and find any updates from the site waiting for you.

That’s all well and good, but there’s a lot more you can do with feeds. Once you start to see the brilliance of reading the news through feeds, you’ll likely want a more sophisticated means of organizing and reading your feeds.

There are a number of desktop clients available of all the major platforms and most of them are free. Popular apps include NetNewsWire (Mac), FeedDemon (Windows) and Straw (Linux). If you don’t want a dedicated feed reader, many e-mail clients also offer support for new feeds.

Then there’s the ever-popular web-based solutions like Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes and countless others. The web-based options often have nice sharing features, like Google Reader which allows you to share items from your news feed with others in a new news feed — feeds within feeds within feeds.

Publishing feeds

From a publishers standpoint feeds sound like a nightmare since they let consumers see your content without visiting your site. That means they get all the good stuff, but you don’t get any page views and advertising hits.

Such thinking fails to see the whole picture though. Compared to the richness of a website, feeds offer little more than text. Feeds offer your users a way to focus on what matters to them, ignoring what doesn’t. At the same time, when your readers do find something they like, we can almost guarantee they’ll click through to your site. Many of them will want to bookmark the page, which requires a visit to your site and if your content is compelling enough they may even link to what you wrote from their own sites.

Offering RSS or Atom feeds will increase your traffic because it gets your content out in the larger world where more people can find it. Feeds are good for traffic and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

You don’t need to be the AP Newswire or an online Samuel Pepys to get good use out of RSS. RSS can spread the word about a band’s tour dates, corporate league sports schedules, civic functions, snow reports, real estate listings, university lectures, software updates, et cetera. If you semi-regularly update content on your website, building an RSS feed gives you another worthwhile way of delivering your content to your readers.

Feeds, particularly Atom feeds, though RSS will work as well, can also serve as kind of primitive API that allows your industrious readers to grab your data and do interesting things with it. Perhaps you have a byline that includes where you published from, users can pull out that data, run it through something like Yahoo Pipes and create a mashup that displays your posts on a map.

Obviously a feed is not a substitute for a full-fledged API, but you may be surprised what some of your more creative readers/programmers are able to do with your feeds.

Producing your own RSS and Atom feeds

Most of today’s more popular publishing systems — WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc. — have built in ways to generate RSS or Atom feeds. All you need to do is add a link on your pages.

More sophisticated options, like a feed for an entry’s comments (so people can follow your discussion from afar) will require a plugin or some custom hacking.

If you’re using your custom built site you may need to write your own RSS or Atom feeds.

But don’t worry, RSS is pretty simple to handle and, while Atom is a little more complex, it isn’t too hard either.

The history of RSS is convulted and somewhat boring, here’s the ten second summary: There are 3 revisions/version of RSS with slightly different features in each. RSS has, at various points stood for Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91), RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90) and Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0).

Of these RSS .91 is probably the most widely supported format, though RSS 2.0 is quickly becoming the standard. For simplicity and forward-compatibility we’ll stick with RSS 2.0.

Inside a typical feed

Here’s a sample version of an RSS 2.0 feed taken from my Flickr feed (I cut out a few things, but otherwise it’s the same for any Flickr user):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<rss version="2.0"

        xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"

	    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"

	    xmlns:flickr="http://flickr.com/services/feeds/">

	<channel>

		<title>Uploads from luxagraf</title>

		<link>http://www.flickr.com/photos/luxagraf/</link>



 		<description></description>

		<pubDate>Thu, 1 May 2008 17:03:32 -0800</pubDate>

		<lastBuildDate>Thu, 1 May 2008 17:03:32 -0800</lastBuildDate>



		<generator>http://www.flickr.com/</generator>



		<image>

			<url>http://farm1.static.flickr.com/25/buddyicons/85322932@N00.jpg?1181220289#85322932@N00</url>

			<title>Uploads from luxagraf</title>

			<link>http://www.flickr.com/photos/luxagraf/</link>



		</image>



		<item>

			<title>texture 1</title>

			<link>http://www.flickr.com/photos/luxagraf/2457443509/</link>



			<description><p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/luxagraf/">luxagraf</a> posted a photo:</p>



            <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/luxagraf/2457443509/" title="texture 1"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2287/2457443509_7b85441d35_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="texture 1" /></a></p>



            </description>

			<pubDate>Thu, 1 May 2008 17:03:32 -0800</pubDate>

		</item>

	</channel>

</rss>

What do you see? Some funny-looking tags, perhaps, but it’s a lot like HTML and XML, isn’t it? Since RSS is an application of XML, RSS feeds must be built as well-formed XML — so when you open a tag, remember to close and nest it properly. Sloppy code won’t work here.

The XML rigmarole likewise requires the first two lines, first defining the XML version. If you don’t know what that means, no worries. Just cut and paste those opening lines, they’re the same for every 2.0 feed.

Next are a few lines specify the RSS version and providing links

Then you’ll notice the channel tag. An RSS channel is the container for each of the items you’re going to publish. The channel metadata then consists of general information about your site, or metadata. Roughly akin to the <head> of an HTML file, this portion of the feed stays the same as updates are added. Here’s where you can start replacing tidbits to tailor it to your site.

Here’s tag-by-tag commentary:

<RSS>: This opening tag includes a mandatory version attribute. Note that the </rss> tag also concludes our feed.

<channel>: The channel is the fundamental container for all RSS data – there’s only one channel in a feed. Note that the channel tag gets closed near the very end of the feed, too.

<title>: Hey, the title! This is most likely going to be the same title as your homepage.

<link>: The URL for the webpage that corresponds to the RSS feed. (Most likely, this is your homepage’s URL.)

<description>: A brief description of what’s in this feed, or the purpose of your site.

<pubDate> and <lastBuildDate>: PubDate refers to the publication date for the content in the channel. For example, if you publish on a daily basis, just update this date once every 24 hours. LastBuildDate refers to the last time the content of the channel changed. In other words whenever you add new content to your feed, update this timestamp. And keep in mind that all date-times in RSS conform to the Date and Time Specification of RFC 822.

<generator> and <image>: Generator just refers to who or what created the file and image is a (totally optional) tag to specify an image that goes with the feed (in Flickr’s case it’s your user image).

Now, onto the <item>s – the dynamic headlines, links, and content you’ll be syndicating. When you update your site and add new stories, new items are added to the RSS feed. Each <item> represents a separate story or content update. Up to 15 items can be included in RSS 0.91.

<item>: This wrapper tag is required around every item

<link>: The permantent URL of an item.

<description>: A synopsis or excerpt of the item, although you’re free to publish the entirety of the item here, as is many peoples’ practice.

<pubDate>: The date for the individual item.

Two pieces of advice to heed while creating your <description>: Firstly, put in the extra effort to create a well-written, easy-to-read description. In the text-centric world of RSS, you can’t expect an audience to click through to your site if your “teaser” excerpt has little appeal or sense to it. Secondly, if there is HTML code in your description, XML parsers throw a fit unless certain HTML symbols (like the ampersand) are escaped out. Either keep HTML out of your description altogether, or encode it via CDATA, like so:

I would <![CDATA[<b>really</b>]]> rather have

just dropped the bold tag.

And that’s it. Done!

Next, let’s validate and automate.

Validating feeds

To ensure your feed is properly formatted, run it against an RSS validator. The validator provided by Feed Validator is a good place to start.

Our example on the previous page is a bare-bones RSS feed. There are plenty of other, optional tags you can include if you wish. You can specifying things like language, copyright and more. Be sure to real the official specification for RSS 2.0 to get the full details.

Of course, the RSS file you’ve created needs to be updated each and every time you add content your site. To avoid the dull and error-prone task of updating RSS feeds manually, most web builders use automated tools to update their RSS.

There are resources on the web which hand out free scripts and tools that you can use to spice up your RSS. webreference offers a web-based form that helps automate the RSS-building process. webdevtips.com has a nice web form, too. Additionally, a number of simpler server-side scripts to create RSS are available in PHP or another language of your choice.

Now that your RSS feed is all dressed-up, let’s announce its availability to the world. Debutante ball, anyone?

Publicize your feed

After uploading your RSS file to your server, you’ll still need to inform people of its existence. When you create a new feed, running through these few steps will debut your feed in style:

• Advertise to web surfers! Put an XML button or text link on your page, linking to the RSS file. This [XML] button is the widely-recognized graphic for RSS feeds, though variants and remixed designs are generally just as recognizable. Go ahead, right-click, Save as…
• There is also a site fully dedicated to standard Newsfeed icons (highly recommended):
• Advertise to the machines! Most RSS applications (and some search spiders) will automatically determine your feeds’ location when you put the following code in the <head> section of your homepage: <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”url/to/rss/file” />
• Get listed by the major feed directories! Syndic8.com and News Is Free are two of the biggest collections of RSS feeds. Before advertising yourself to these sites, though, run a final test against an RSS validator. While web browsers will render many poorly-coded web pages, RSS parsers can be less forgiving, and require a well-formed XML file to work with.

Of course, there’s always more to discover, if you are so inclined. Solid RSS tutorials have been written by Mark Nottingham, Fagan Finder, and Danny Sullivan. We’d be remiss not mentioning webReference.com’s large RSS library, and the surprise entry from the State of Utah which provides a great introduction to the subject. Lastly, of course, there’s a definitive dead-tree resource from O’Reilly press, covering RSS in depth, not to mention a special RSS DevCenter site.

Happy feeding!

With the explosive growth of podcasting, publishers are including more multimedia in their RSS feeds than ever. While the method of including media content in an RSS feed with enclosures is fairly well known, there are other methods available for including media content in RSS feeds, one of which is Media RSS.

Media RSS is an RSS module that was created to expand the way that multimedia content could be included in an RSS feed.

Originally authored by Yahoo! to improve media enclosures in RSS and also allow the submission of media content to its search engine via RSS, the development of Media RSS has since been opened up to the RSS community through the rss-media mailing list. Full disclosure: I’m also one of the people at Yahoo! who worked on the creation of Media RSS.

Before I go into how Media RSS works, I’ll start by reviewing the standard ways of including multimedia content into RSS feeds, and then show you the advantage that Media RSS brings to the table.

With the current version of RSS, you can include media content as an enclosure. These were added in RSS 2.0 to allow publishers to include media files in their RSS feeds. This has the advantage of being supported by nearly all RSS aggregators, but you are restricted to adding only one media enclosure per <item>, and there are only two metadata fields:MIME type and file size. Here’s an example of an RSS enclosure:

<enclosure url="http://www.webmonkey.com/monkeyrock.mpg"

length="2471632" type="video/mpeg"/>

Alternatively, there is Media RSS. Media RSS takes the idea of adding multimedia content into an RSS feed and expands it by allowing publishers to include various bits of helpful information about the media files they are publishing. Because Media RSS is a module that extends the current RSS 2.0 spec, all the Media RSS fields are normally prefixed with “media:” to show they are part of Media RSS. For a quick overview of Media RSS, you can read Yahoo!’s Media RSS FAQ.

One of the immediate advantages of Media RSS is that it allows you to associate multiple pieces of media content with a single item in an RSS feed. For example, you can have an <item> linking to a blog entry about a specific day of your vacation in Rome, and then you can use Media RSS to include in the <item> several photos and a short video taken with your camera that day.

In addition, you can provide a lot more metadata about your media, including full time-coded transcripts, keywords and thumbnail images. Media RSS also supports linking to embedded players, which is great for those of you hosting your media content on sites like YouTube. There are also examples in the Media RSS specification showing how it can be used to link to Bittorrent files and Creative Commons-licensed media files.

The visible feed

I’ve put together an example RSS feed with a Media RSS video in it so you can see how it could work. I’m only using a simple subset of fields for this example. I’ll list the other potential fields you can use in a moment. I’m using a feed example of an (unfortunately) non-existent Webmonkey band.

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">

<channel>

<title>Some Bands I Like</title>

<link>http://www.andyvolk.com/webmonkey/bands/</link>



<description>A list of some bands I like

(or have been a member of).</description>



<item>



<title>Rocking Webmonkey Garage Band</title>

<link>http://www.webmonkey.com/ourband.html</link>

<description>The best ever garage band on the Internet.</description>



<guid isPermaLink="false"> http://www.webmonkey.com/ourband.html</guid>



<media:content url="http://www.webmonkey.com/monkeyrock.mpg"

fileSize="2471632" type="video/mpeg" height="240" width="320"

duration="147" medium="video" isDefault="true">

<media:title>The Webmonkey Band "Monkey Rock"</media:title>

<media:description>See Rocking Webmonkey Garage Band playing our

classic song "Monkey Rock" to a sold-out audience at the Fillmore

Auditorium.</media:description>

<media:thumbnail url="

http://www.webmonkey.com/images/monkeyrock-thumb.jpg"

height="98" width="145"/>



</media:content>



<media:content duration="180" medium="video" isDefault="true">

<media:title>The Webmonkey Band - Fan Snippets</media:title>

<media:description>Some cool video uploaded by our fans

from a show at Bottom of the Hill.</media:description>

<media:player url="http://www.somevideouploadsite/webmonkey.html" />

<media:thumbnail url="http://www.webmonkey.com/images/both-thumb.jpg"

height="98" width="145"/>



</media:content>



</item>



</channel>

</rss>

The opening line is a standard RSS opening tag, with one important exception. To use Media RSS, instead of having a standard <rss version="2.0"> line in your header to declare the RSS version, you should have this line in your header to declare that you’re using the Media RSS extensions to RSS 2.0:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">

The <media:content> element is the core of Media RSS. It’s an element that you use to describe a media file. While the only required attribute is either a URL or the use of a <media:player> element later, there are thirteen (!) other fields you can use to describe your media object. The Media RSS spec gives a full rundown of the attributes you can use, but I’ll list a few one of most useful ones here:

url: A direct URL to the media object. Pretty straightforward, eh?

fileSize: The size of the media object in bytes. Always handy to let folks know if you’re sending them a two megabyte or a two gigabyte (Hello, HD video!) media file.

type is the MIME type of the media object (i.e.:”video/quicktime”). If you’re not going to use this, you should consider using the medium attribute instead to tell user what kind of content you have.

medium gives the type of the media object. Values you can use for this are “image”, “audio”, “video”, “document”, or “executable”.

expression indicates whether you’re linking to a short sample of a longer video (“sample”), or if you’re linking to the full thing (“full”), or if you’re linking to a live stream (“nonstop”).

duration is the length of your media file in seconds. Letting people know the difference between a two minute song and a three hour independent film tour de force is probably a good idea.

<media:title>. Put the title of your media file here (surprise, surprise). You can either just put plain text into this element, or you can set the type attribute to “HTML” if you want to use HTML here.

<media:description>. Here’s where you put the text description of your media file. As with <media:title>, set the type attribute to “HTML” if you’d like to use an HTML description instead.

<media:thumbnail> This element allows you publish a thumbnail image of your image or video. For Media RSS aware readers, this is a key feature, since readers are more likely to click on your media content if it has a nice shiny thumbnail. You’ll definitely need to give the URL attribute of your thumbnail image, which is all you basically need to do in order to include a thumbnail image.

<media:player> This is where things start getting to be even more fun. With the growth of video upload sites, often a piece of video content is only available through accessing a webpage rather than downloading a video file directly. By using the player attribute to point to your media content, you can tell the RSS reader to pop up a player window with your video content in it, rather than trying to download a file. The only required attribute here is the URL of the player’s webpage, but giving the height and width of the player in pixels will let you control the size the window showing this player page.

A note on compatibility:You can ensure compatibility with RSS readers that only support enclosures by putting an <enclosure> tag around versions of the same elements that you’re including as <media:content> items in your Media RSS feed. Remember that you can only use one enclosure per item. Since enclosure support is nearly universal in media-aware RSS readers, I strongly recommend that you also include enclosures in your Media RSS feeds.

For example, in the first <item> of the feed above, you could insert this line to include an enclosure version of the same media file that was included as the default <media:content> item:

<enclosure url="http://www.webmonkey.com/monkeyrock.mpg" length="2471632" type="video/mpeg"/>

Now let’s look at some of the more advanced elements that you can include in your feeds.

Advanced geekery

Alright, now we’re getting to the stuff for advanced media geeks. Here are the fields that let you specify more granular information about your media files. If you’re just creating a simple Media RSS feed, you may never need to use these.

isDefault comes in handy when you have multiple media files enclosed in a <media:group>. This attribute lets you tell the RSS reader which media file to play by default. Set this attribute to “true” for your default media object in an <item>. No cheating by setting this to true for multiple objects in a single <item>!

<media:group> is useful for more complex publishing setups. Let’s say you’re publishing your latest indie movie sensation, and you want to include two versions of the video, one at 300K and one at 700K. Both versions of your video could be <media:content> items under the same <media:group>. In addition, you can use the isDefault field to indicate which one of the two items from that group should be played by default. Another example could be if you had the same video clip with different versions that had voiceovers in other languages. Two <media:content> items (each with the language indicated in the lang attribute) could be placed under the same media group.

<media:keywords>. A comma-delimited list of relevant keywords that describe your media content. Handy for search engine optimization.

<media:category>. If you want to add still more detail, you can label your content with the category (such as Flickr tags or a music genre) element. See the Media RSS specification for information on what category schemes you can use here.

<media:text>. If you really want to add detail, you can submit a transcript of every bit of speech in your media files, including timecodes indicating when every sentence was spoken. This works for closed captioning transcripts, song lyrics, or any other spoken words in your video. RSS karaoke, anyone? Here’s an example using the world’s worst song lyrics:

<media:text type="plain" lang="en" start="00:00:01.000" end="00:00:7.000">

My name is Andy and I never stop rocking with the Webmonkey band</media:text>

<media:text type="plain" lang="en" start="00:00:7.000" end="00:00:12.000">

I've got Mike Calore on the bass and he's rocking too</media:text>

<media:credit> is handy for giving credit to all those people who made the piece of content that you’re featuring. Using the correct format to enter all of the people is a little complex, so see the Media RSS specification for information on how to enter <media:credit> elements.

<media:copyright>. Use the copyright element to add a copyright notice to your piece of content. You can use plain text here, or you can set the type attribute to “HTML” if you want to use HTML instead.

<media:rating> For all of you concerned parents out there, the <media:rating> tag allows you to indicate when you’re including explicit content. No more unlabelled MC5 lyrics! This can support any number of ratings schemes, but complex ratings schemes are difficult to implement. I recommend sticking with the simple “adult” or “nonadult” values for this tag. Keep in mind that for this feature, you’re relying on the user’s RSS reader to support these fields properly.

Reading and writing

Of course, having all of these useful fields doesn’t do you much good without a properly equipped reader. So you’ll want to check to see which of the many optional Media RSS fields are being supported by your reader, or already supported by your publishing tool. For example, Feedburner already supports Media RSS output, and some RSS readers/aggregators such as FireANT already support Media RSS intake.

So where is all of this headed? I’d like to think that Media RSS is going to allow RSS readers to handle media more intelligently, and take some of the burden off of publishers. One example of this is how websites ask you to choose a favorite player/format and streaming video bitrate. It’s pretty silly to have every website you visit ask you these questions — with an intelligent Media RSS reader, you could tell it your preferences, and it would automatically select the right pieces of content from a website’s Media RSS feed. All the publisher would need to do is list links in their feed to all available encoded versions of their media content, and let the feed reader do the rest.

In addition, online streaming media content delivery is rapidly moving away from allowing users to download video files. Instead, they’re played via a streaming media player hosted on the publisher’s website. Because Media RSS lets you treat a streaming media player in a website as a piece of media content, and set attributes like thumbnails, video formats, transcripts, and so on, you can still leverage Media RSS extensions to give rich data about your content without having to allow users to link to it directly.

Media RSS also has a lot of promise as a data exchange standard between websites with large repositories of media content. Some of the flags such as <media:rating> were designed with this scenario in mind, so it’s a good way to package up a lot of metadata about a large set of media files to deliver to a search engine.

The big thing to take away here is that the way media is being delivered via RSS feeds is changing fast. There is at least one other similar RSS module out there, Apple’s itms:extension (PDF download), which they’ve created for podcasts and iTunes. By supporting multiple systems for enclosing media content in your RSS feeds, you can give your readers the best experience possible on the RSS reader that they choose to use.

Thanks to David Hall at Yahoo! for his feedback and thoughts on Media RSS, which were included in this article.