Most of us don’t have to worry about creating an RSS feed for our sites – the CMS tool will do that automatically. But there are times when you are creating a custom application – when you have to create an RSS feed yourself. Creating it is easy – they don’t call it Really Simple Syndication for nothing. But there are a few rules(or rather, guidelines) that are ignored by most – make sure you follow them.

I am by no means an expert on this format – but I have created RSS feeds and have worked on applications to parse it. So I have seen my share of bad implementations.

Use RSS rather than Atom

I prefer using RSS as opposed to the Atom format. But Atom is now supported on almost all feed readers – so this preference may change. But for now, I like RSS better than Atom.

Last-Modified

Make sure your feed has the last modified header. This will prevent unnecessary downloading of the feed if there are no new articles. It saves both the site’s and the user’s bandwidth.

This is extremely easy in PHP…

$last_edited = '2008-07-17 01:02:03'; // This should be the time of the latest post.
header("Last-Modified: " . date('r',strtotime($last_edited)));

10 Posts

Make sure you provide a limited number of posts in the feed – the perfect number, in my opinion, is 10. It can increase or decrease a bit – its no big deal. If your posting frequency is high, the number should increase. And if the frequency is low, the number of items in the feed can go down.

But make sure that you are not including all the posts from the beginning of time until now. This is a big waste of bandwidth. Unfortunately, many have adopted this method. For example, take this feed – Cat and Girl Comic feed.

The other extream is just as bad – providing just the latest item in the feed. If the author writes two posts in quick succession, the viewers may not get an article. An example for this in the subnormality comic.

Validate it

XML is not as forgiving as HTML – so make sure you validate your feed before releasing it upon the world.

Use FeedBurner

When it comes to deployment, using FeedBurner is a better option that using your own server. In addition to its statistics, it will also act as a CDN lowering the load on your server.

In FLOSS circles, March 26 is celebrated as the Document Freedom Day.

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general.

This is when I realized that people actually use the office packages daily. I almost never use it. According to me there are three options to store text data.

• Plain Text
• HTML
• Database

Plain Text

The simplest format there is. If there is something I should remember, I just put it in a text file and save it to the desktop. I used to use it a lot earlier – but I don’t use it much nowadays due to searchability issues. There are quite a few advantages in using the text format

HTML

If I need any formatting in the text, I create the document in HTML. It is easier for me to create the formatting using HTML code that using WYSIWYG Word Processors(like MS Word). I write all my blog posts in HTML – perhaps the only occasion where I need formatting.

Database

My favorite method to store text data is in a database. I am a web developer – so I always have a Web Server and Database server running on my system – so this system is perfect for me.

Interface

Remove that scared look on your face – I don’t use phpMyAdmin or any Database Administration tools as the interface to save/view the data. I use my own custom scripts or WordPress.

The best example of this is txt. Txt is my code snippets/commands repository. You can view the full story in the Saving Code Snippets post.

That’s an online example – I also have a personal wordpress blog running in my local server. I use it to record events, purchases, store receipts etc.

Advantages

Tagging

Tagging is heaven-sent to make information more findable – any del.icio.us user should know that. I used to install Ultimate Tag Warrior to get this feature – but WordPress now supports tags natively.

Searching

Searching for data within a database is much more easier, faster and provides more relevent results than searching for the data in a collection of file. Even if you are using a file indexing software like Google Desktop Search or Beagle/Recoll(for linux users), I find database searching more easier. Another advantage of using database to search is that you can create complex queries if you know SQL.

Disadvantages

Not for everyone

Let’s face it – installing and maintaining a web/database server is a tad in the geek zone. An average Joe will find it just a little bit out of their league.

Overhead

Running a web server and a database server is a bit demanding on the RAM.

Backing up a little more complicated – but easier

Backing up the data in a Database is not as straight forward as backing up files – but its actually easier if you know how.

Online

One extra method to store the data – online. This data is stored in a database – but you don’t have the disadvantages associated with using a database. More and more people are turning to this method now. I did not include it in the initial list because its not a data format – its more of a data storing method.