RSS Feeds

This past week in class we learned about RSS feeds, which stands for rich site summary and allows the webmaster to "Provide fresh and relevant content on their website, which encourages users to return", according to What is RSS?. The goal of the class was to incorporate RSS feeds into our personal website by working in groups. Unfortunately, my group did not figure it out. However, we did make some of progress.

I had never really paid much attention to RSS feeds, even though I see them offered pretty often on Websites I visit. For example, I have always noticed that Pop Candy, a pop culture blog run by USA today offers readers the option of subscribing to a feed. Once I realized that I could post headline from something like Pop Candy on my personal Website, RSS feeds became much more interesting. Now, my site could be updated with news that I like from sites I visit everyday.

When my group first started learning about RSS feeds, we found it very confusing. We read through some tips, but we couldn't quite manage to get the RSS feed to appear on our sites. Instead, we looked at example of Websites that off RSS feeds, such as The New York Times. However, simply subscribing to this feed didn't work either.

Finally, after some advice from the BBC, we figured out that we needed to download a news reader. We also discovered that we needed to open an XSLT page in Dreamweaver to create a feed. XSLT is XML based, which is important because RSS feeds are in XML (Extensible Markup Language).

I found Feed Tools in Dreamweaver 8 and CS3: RSS and XSL to be very useful. This site tells the reader how to create an RSS feed in Dreamweaver step by step, and, for the most part, is very easy to understand. Once I have followed the advice of this Website, opened an XSLT page in Dreamweaver and downloaded a news reader, I believe I will be ready to incorporate a feed into a site.