Creating an RSS feed for your Site

This tutorial shows you a way that you can manually create and maintain an RSS feed for your site. In this example, I will simply create an RSS feed on my computer, upload it to the resource manager, and then link to my feed.

1.) Open Notepad or a similar text editor (note: do not use a word processor like Word because it will add in its own formatting).

Toucanmultimedia have quite a nice tool for creating RSS at:
http://www.toucanmultimedia.com/rssmaker.php
You can use that to help you generate an RSS file, otherwise,
I have take this example of an RSS 2.0 feed from Wikipedia, I would advise you to copy and paste this into your notepad and then simply edit it. Each <item> tag represents a story. Edit the code below to suit your needs:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Lift Off News</title>
    <link>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/</link>
    <description>Liftoff to Space Exploration.</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2003 04:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
    <lastBuildDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2003 09:41:01 GMT</lastBuildDate>
    <docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
    <generator>Weblog Editor 2.0</generator>
    <managingEditor>editor@example.com</managingEditor>
    <webMaster>webmaster@example.com</webMaster>
    <ttl>5</ttl>
 
    <item>
      <title>Star City</title>
      <link>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2003/news-starcity.asp</link>
      <description>How do Americans get ready to work with Russians aboard the
        International Space Station? They take a crash course in culture, language
        and protocol at Russia's Star City.</description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2003 09:39:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/06/03.html#item573</guid>
    </item>
 
    <item>
      <title>Space Exploration</title>
      <link>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/</link>
      <description>Sky watchers in Europe, Asia, and parts of Alaska and Canada
        will experience a partial eclipse of the Sun on Saturday, May 31st.</description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 May 2003 11:06:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/05/30.html#item572</guid>
    </item>
 
    <item>
      <title>The Engine That Does More</title>
      <link>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2003/news-VASIMR.asp</link>
      <description>Before man travels to Mars, NASA hopes to design new engines
        that will let us fly through the Solar System more quickly.  The proposed
        VASIMR engine would do that.</description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2003 08:37:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/05/27.html#item571</guid>
    </item>
 
    <item>
      <title>Astronauts' Dirty Laundry</title>
      <link>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2003/news-laundry.asp</link>
      <description>Compared to earlier spacecraft, the International Space
        Station has many luxuries, but laundry facilities are not one of them.
        Instead, astronauts have other options.</description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 May 2003 08:56:02 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/2003/05/20.html#item570</guid>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

2.) Once you are done, save this file as rss.xml, open the File Manager in SynthaSite and upload the file to your SynthaSite

3.) Now lets add a link to our RSS feed. Drag an HTML widget onto your page and paste the following code into it:

<a href = "resources/rss.xml" >
<img src = "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Feed-icon.svg/48px-Feed-icon.svg.png" />
</a>

4.) Congratulations. You now have a link to your own RSS feed!