How to Make an RSS Feed for your Dreamweaver Website
We're going to make an RSS feed for our Dreamweaver website. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a way to provide your users a way to find out about any new website content you have made. An RSS content feed is also great for reaching out to new users looking for the particular type of content you are providing.
An RSS feed is usually made in an XML Format and is saved into the root directory of your website which is the best place for a search engine crawler to find it.
Most people will use an RSS Agregator to read your RSS content like Google Feed Reader. Once you make an RSS feed, you can put a simple link which will take people to the page of your feed and they can copy the URL of the RSS Feed into their RSS reading Software.
I have the link to my RSS feed on the side of the browser window.
People can just click on the RSS feed subscribe button from there. You can group it next to some of your other social bookmarking networks like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and Youtube.
Making the RSS Feed in Dreamweaver opening an XML document - Step 1
So the first thing you need to do when making RSS feeds is to open up a blank XML document from Dreamweaver:
- Open up Dreamweaver and from the opening menu you need to go to File > New :
- Select a Blank XML document from the document window and then press Create :
Now, your document encoding should already be preset to utf 8, version 1.0 :
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
Below the encoding you will need to add an opening RSS tag which is like the body tag you would use in HTML code. The tag will eventually be closed with a </rss> tag at the end of the document. So open the RSS feed by typing this code:
<rss version="2.0">
All of you content will now go into a <channel> tag and this tag will contain all of the items for your RSS feed. It will be closed with a closing </channel> tag when you have finished entering all of the items for your RSS feed.
Set-up your RSS Feed Channel Information - Step 2
Ok, so by now you should have an open RSS tag and an open Channel tag like this:
<rss version="2.0"> <channel>
Now its time to put in some channel information so that when people find your RSS feed they will know the name of your website, some author information and a link back to your website. You may also want to supply and email address so people can get in touch with you.
I have filled the channel details in with my own information. If you want to, copy and paste this into your XML document and type over it with your own information. As you can see, the 'title tag' refers to the name of the RSS feed. The 'link tag' refers to URL of your website. The 'description tag' is a short description of what your RSS channel is all about. Then 'language tag' refers to the region. If you are from the United States you might like to put 'en-us.' You can specify your email address in the 'webmaster tag' and also add a 'copyright tag' too:
<title>Dreamweaver Tutorial Videos and Articles</title>
<link>http://www.dreamweavertutorial.co.uk</link>
<description> Dreamweaver Video Tutorials and Articles for the Beginner upwards! Dreamweaver, Fireworks, JavaScript, PHP and XML </description>
<language>en-uk</language> <webMaster>[email protected]</webMaster>
<copyright>Copyright (c)2010</copyright>
How about an Image for you RSS Feed? - Step 3
You will probably want to put an image logo into your RSS feed for branding and identification purposes like I have done here:
Why don't you take a look at my RSS Feed to see what I mean.
Adding an Item into your RSS Feed - Step 4
Closing the RSS tags of your XML file - Step 5
What to save your RSS Feed as and Where to Save it -Step 6
Save your RSS content feed as: feed.xml
Save it into your root directory where your Index.html file is also located.
Lastly, Upload your RSS Feed to your server! Any Problems? email me using the contact form.