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After a fair bit of studying of RSS, I see that the basic XML used for RSS is relatively simple (no pun intended). My best bet is to write a program to scrape my own Blog the way I want to, and create an xml file in RSS format. I’ll pick RSS 0.91 since its specs are really all I need. … After an hour or so, I have a program to do so. It only took about 100 lines of code to do so. Verifying the result with an online RSS syntax checker, I quickly get the last few bugs out of it. Now, each time I update this blog, I’ll just have to run my blog2rss program to get a new .xml file to upload along with the blog. Required extra time: about 5 seconds.
It might be useful to outline what I found:
- RSS - A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers - This was the best summary of RSS that I found. Be sure to check out section 3: “What is RSS?”
- Blogs and News Aggregators without the Aggravation (and Only a Little Serendipity) - A nice summary of some of the best tools to find and use weblogs.
- RSSify at VoidStar.com - A service I looked at that I would have considered for scraping my blog, but it no longer is active. However, the php code it uses is available and is useful. Unfortunately, I can’t run php with my webhost, but the concepts were useful.
- How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer - This was my inspiration for writing my own blog to rss program.
- Raising the Bar on RSS Feed Quality - An excellent article that helped me polish the program.
- FEED Validator for Atom and RSS and RSS Validator - Then I used these to ensure my feed was valid.
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