RSS Feeds

[Anonymous]

I have no idea how to set them up. I was just wondering if anyone had any idea if there was a way to set one up for your activity of the forum. I'm just reading more about them and messing with various things with other sites I visit and RSS feeds.

[Anonymous]

I've been researching RSS feeds for work, pretty basic ones that will let you have a bunch of articles.  I can post a template for a basic one if that's what you're looking for.

[Anonymous]

I'm not exactly sure how it would work.
Sure though! that would be neat.

[Anonymous]

To use this template, just copy it into Notepad (any text editor that will let you save a file as plain text will do, I'm just stuck on Notepad) and plug in your information where needed.

Code: [Select]

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>RSS feed's name goes here</title>
<link>http://remnants.spiritsoftheearth.net/forum</link>
<description>A description for the entire RSS feed</description>
<language>en-us</language>

<image>
<title>Title of optional image part</title>
<url>http://www.optionalimage.com/url/whateverelse.jpg</url>
<link>Where clicking the image takes you.</link>
<width>Image width in pixels</width>
<height>Image height in pixels</height>
</image>

<item>
<title>Title of article.</title>
<link>Link to your forum post.</link>
<guid>Link to your forum post.</guid>
<description>Description of whatever is in this article.</description>
</item>

Repeat the <item> sections to add more items to the feed.  Once you've got enough you pull it all closed with this:

Code: [Select]

</channel>
</rss>

Now!  There are a couple characters you can't write in your descriptions or link urls or you'll throw the whole thing out of whack.   Everything that's in a tag is pretty much safe.  Here's a list of the characters that will mess it up and what you need to replace them with.

&
Replace all ampersands with &amp;
posting.php?mode=reply&f=48&t=1726 would be posting.php?mode=reply&amp;f=48&amp;t=1726

"
Replace quotation marks with &quot;
"Hi!!" would become &quot;Hi!!&quot;

'
Replace apostrophes with &apos;
It's a kitty! would become It&apos;s a kitty!

<
Replace less than symbols with &lt;
2 < 4 would be 2 &lt; 4

>
Replace greater than symbols with &gt;

Additionally, you can add the <category></category> tag to your items to organize them into categories.

Once you've finished tweaking the file save it as a plain text (.txt ANSI encoding) file, the name you give it doesn't matter.

Now, you take that notepad file and save it a web server.  Once it's there you can go here, plug in the address and check to see if it's working like it's supposed to.  Then you can plug the address into an RSS reader and be good to go.

Alternately, you can go here download the program, plug in your info and ka-bam.  RSS file.

Let me know if you have any other questions or problems getting it to work!

[Anonymous]

Fantastic! Thank you so much. <3