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As you get to know the world of internet a little better, you will realize the need to subscribe to websites, monitor them, and create your own information pages.  RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds being the most important aspect of web communication; the biggest question remains how to create RSS feeds?

RSS feeds are mainly created in XML that is very similar in coding to HTML. If you know HTML, you can very easily understand someone else’s code and can even copy paste the required coding lines. Even if you are not familiar with HTML, you have many editors or tools that can help you build the code.

Creating RSS feeds
If you are blogging, most blogging sites will offer to create RSS feeds for you at the click of a button. You can otherwise create RSS feeds with *WYSWIG tools for pages you are building from scratch without getting into the technicalities. Software tools like FeedForAll and Feed Mix handle everything from creation to publishing and editing. Some tools even offer the ability to create podcasts.

There are many online tools also like RSS Creator that requires you to provide the necessary information and they do the complete job for you. Typically an RSS feed needs 3 basic information points

•    Title
•    Description
•    Link

These entire things combine together to create an item. The Title is the tagline that defines what the information is all about and is enclosed in <title></title> tags. Description is the information you plan to communicate and is enclosed by <description></description> tags. The link offers the URL to reach that particular information set and is enclosed by <link></link> tags. The information further needs to be defined as a channel. The beginning of a RSS file is marked by the XML version and RSS version tags. It defines which version of XML and RSS are being used. Once the file is created and saved, it should be validated to see if it is correct or not.

There are different versions of RSS and the most popular ones are RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0. RSS 1.0 is considered complicated and hence used only by more experienced users. But it does offer certain special capabilities. Whatever is you choice, whether you choose to create RSS feed or take help of software, RSS feed is the best way to let the world know about your site and its pages.

*A WYSIWYG (pronounced “wiz-ee-wig”) editor or program allows a developer to see what the end result will look like while the interface or document is being created. WYSIWYG is an acronym for “what you see is what you get”.