4 replies to this topic

[mrdee]

Allowing RSS feeds from a non-CMS website

My website is mainly text and graphics based and uses no CMS whatsoever, no Wordpress, nor Joomla nor anything else.

I have made one of the pages (the news page) available on Twitter, mainly because that is quite simple to do.
However, not everyone is equally interested in Twitter, or there are people who prefer to use something different, or people who are not familiar with using Twitter.

Therefore I would like to know if it is possible to add an RSS feed to my news page so that people can be informed if anything changes or anything gets added to the page.

I must admit I am not very knowledgeable when it comes to RSS feeds, as I use them very rarely myself, however, I have been told that there is a lot of interest in them and people who follow sites like to use them a lot.

Now I was wondering if it is possible to add an RSS feed to my page by using either:

• A script (PHP or other)
  
• A Java applet
  
• Some HTML code
  
• A simple link to a page that provides RSS services

For the specialists among you, if it helps, you can always go and have a look how exactly my page looks and how it is laid out by clicking here.

(I don't know whether that would be relevant to decide whether it is possible to add an RSS feed to my news page or not, I just thought it might be useful to mention it, just in case).

If there are specialists among you who can decide whether or not it would be appropriate, relevant or possible to add an RSS feed to my news page, and if it is, who can point me into the right direction of how to do it, I would love to hear from you.

I also hope I was right in posting it under the topic Telecommunications, since I see utilities like Twitter, RSS, Del.icio.us, Digg and the likes as forms of telecommunications.

I am looking forward to getting input from people specialised in those matters.

All advice will be gratefully accepted.

Thank you.

[anwiii]

i am confused what you want to do. do you want to create an rss feed and display it on your news feed or do you want to display an rss feed that is already published on the web?

to create an rss feed it's not that hard and there are free programs for that. to display an rss feed on a web page without the xml garbage and just the news, you will need a script so the page would have to be in php. basicially a script that reads an rss feed and can convert the format(rss feed reader).

for the latter, i have a really good script. i used it for one of my other sites. if you google it, you can probably find some scripts but from my own experience and research, there is only 1 good one out there. the name of the script is carp. there is a free version and a paid version. i have the paid version when they were giving it away for a limited time.

now carp is easy to install and easy to learn, but just takes time to understand everything and how to modify the settings depending on how you want your output to be on your web page. the download link to carp evolution 4 is http://customers.gec...m/downloads.php

hope this helps. to find out more about it, just visit the main page

[k_nitin_r]

Mr.Dee,

As you are not using a content management system for your website, you do not have the ability to configure your setup to send out updates via RSS. If you are running your website on a template engine, such as Smarty, you may be able to create another template with XML output instead of sending out HTML. This approach is the simplest if your website is currently running on a template engine. You may be able to get an RSS template that you can replace the variables in to get your data through. If you are using custom PHP scripts to power your website, you have to code the scripts to generate XML output yourself. You have to escape the bits of data that would be invalid within the XML so you could use some sort of a filter ( a function through which all of the data is passed so you can substitute the data that is invalid XML). The W3C site may be able to help you with validating the XML that you generate. I'm not sure, but I am guessing that they may have an RSS validation service as well.

I would classify this thread under programming rather than under telecommunications because I see telecommunications as the signal processing and transmission of signals through radio waves, light, and other forms of communication, rather than the study of data formats and interoperability of information systems, which I see as more of a programming ordeal.

[mahesh2k]

In case of content management system you get to use RSS without any issues at all. You just have to either check the feed on feedburner so that you can get the address. I have done this plenty of times and found two rss feed address - one is atom and another xml feed this way. As for the static sites or the custom cms sites where you have to configure the RSS on your own. I think html2rss is one of the site that lets you use the option for the RSS. If you don't know how to create feeds then this is the way to add individual pages or entire sitemap and then making rss feed out of it.

There are some tutorials on google that lets you find the rss feed for any website. As google is broken due to panda update i couldn't come up with any good tutorial. As for now i can only suggest HTML2RSS site for you. Do check feedburner by the way, it will let you find the address of the cms if you have one, if not then manually create one.

[k_nitin_r]

HTML 5 makes it easy to slap on another script to a custom content management system to parse the HTML output and pluck out the articles to display. The article tag combined with a heading tag (h1 to h6) can be used in combination to assist scripts with getting articles out of a web page and build an RSS feed out of it. However, the tools would probably get just the first page of articles, which is acceptable for most websites because they rarely need to get more than the recent articles into an RSS feed but on websites that maintain a list of few articles on each page but want to have more articles to be output as RSS feeds, it does take a bit of working around depending on how the content management system has been built. A custom content management system that uses page numbers to from one page to another with page one being the latest of posts and the last page being the earliest of posts, the creation of an RSS feed from the website is rather simple. If the pagination order is reversed, it does get a little more complicated because the tool or script that you use to generate an RSS feed from the page would have to know which direction to increment the numbers in to get the next page (i.e. should the tool or script increase the number that it finds by one, or should it decrease the number by one). These are still manageable but there are other custom content management systems out there that use the ID of the last post on the page rather than a page number so it does get further complicated to get a tool or a script to figure out how to go to the next page. From a performance perspective, however, this last approach may get you the quickest fetches from the database of the content management system but the tool or script that uses the markup to generate a newsfeed would require more scripting to get the same job done as with the other two approaches of content pagination with each page displaying a heading and article summary of a certain number of articles.