Simple RSS feeds question...

[CRON]

Hi all,
i run a large membership site for scouts and I'm looking into
incorporating RSS feeds into the news pages. Problem is, I know nothing
about them! I've managed to get a simple test feed to work but I'm a
little confused! My basic question is this:

Do I just keep adding new topics to the top of the xml file every day
or do I just put the new stuff in the file and delete the rest? ie. Do
RSS readers automatically remember feed history or what?

One more (slightly harder) question: Is it possible to add PHP to a
feed or use a CRON job to write a feed which pulls info from a mySQL
database?

Thanks!
Ciarán

 

[Toby Inkster]

Do I just keep adding new topics to the top of the xml file every day
or do I just put the new stuff in the file and delete the rest? ie. Do
RSS readers automatically remember feed history or what?

For the sake of your own bandwidth, cut out old articles. Maintain it at a
level of about 10 to 15 articles total.

Imagine that 1000 people subscribe to your RSS feed; and on average they
download it every 2 hours. Now for every 1 KB in size that your RSS file
is, you could potentially be sending 370 MB of data! (Of course, caching
will reduce this, but many RSS clients are dumb, so caching will not
always work.)

One more (slightly harder) question: Is it possible to add PHP to a
feed

Of course it is; it's even possible to add PHP to a JPEG if you know what
you're doing!

Assuming your site is content managed, it's certainly easier to pull news
items or new articles from the database with a script than update the RSS
manually!

or use a CRON job to write a feed which pulls info from a mySQL
database?

Even better.

 

[Andy Dingley]

i run a large membership site for scouts and I'm looking into
incorporating RSS feeds into the news pages. Problem is, I know nothing
about them!

Good - a little knowledge is dangerous!

I suggest you take a fairly "hands off" approach here. Rather than
trying to learn everything about RSS, then just install a simple CMS
(one of the many forms of ready-built blog would be adequate) and then
use that for publishing your "articles". This should give you easy
article editing, automatic HTML publishing and automatic RSS / Atom
publishing too.

 

[CRON]

OK Thanks for the help guys. It all sounds very promising....

For the sake of your own bandwidth, cut out old articles. Maintain it at a
level of about 10 to 15 articles total.

So it seems what you see when you subscribe to a feed is just the exact
content of a regularly updated file? I mean the reader doesn't usually
save the old articles or anything does it?


Cheers,
Ciarán

 

[Toby Inkster]

So it seems what you see when you subscribe to a feed is just the exact
content of a regularly updated file? I mean the reader doesn't usually
save the old articles or anything does it?

Depends on the reader. ISTR that Opera's RSS reader does. I'd be surprised
if it were the only one.