easier way to do RSS?

[David D]

Has there become a simple way to do RSS in the past 6 months? I tried
the hand-typed way and it seemed too long and tedious for me - time
consuming. And I kept getting things wrong in the XML, so I just
mostly gave up. I have a bunch of video and mp3's that I want to RSS
to different podcast and videocast sites, but I hate doing all the
typing. Is there software or something that has streamlined it and
made it easier? Thanks

 

[David D]

BTW, here is the feed.
http://www.bionicbuddha.com/mp3/bionicbuddha.xml

 

[Joe Kesselman]

Haven't played with RSS, but there are many articles on it on
DeveloperWorks (http://www.ibm.com/xml); one of them might be helpful...?

 

[Simon Brooke]

Has there become a simple way to do RSS in the past 6 months? I tried
the hand-typed way and it seemed too long and tedious for me - time
consuming. And I kept getting things wrong in the XML, so I just
mostly gave up. I have a bunch of video and mp3's that I want to RSS
to different podcast and videocast sites, but I hate doing all the
typing. Is there software or something that has streamlined it and
made it easier? Thanks

Has anyone ever hand typed RSS? Don't you generate it off whatever you
generate the rest of your content off? It must be simpler to write a
script to generate your RSS than to write your RSS by hand - and if you
write a script you'll only have to do it once.

 

[David D]

Yeah, I don;'t know how to write script. That is why I am asking, not
sure about all of it. I have just cut and paste someone else's xml
file and gone from there - so that is why I keep making mistake. If
there was an automatic way of doing it, it would be a godsend.

 

[Andy Dingley]

Has there become a simple way to do RSS in the past 6 months?

Evolutionary improvements, nothing radical.

I tried the hand-typed way and it seemed too long and tedious for me

It is. The only people who do this are idiot XML / RDF geeks like me.
I generate some sites by hand-coding their RSS, then script generating
the HTML from it! Quite speedy if you grok XML / XSLT already, but
hardly user-friendly.

Is there software or something that has streamlined it and made it easier?

Almost any blog software. I'm not up with this week's favourites, but
any credible blog will spit out RSS 2.0, and there should be plenty
that also do the extra podcast markup.

I can't imagine doing it by generating "a site" in HTML, then querying
it to generate an RSS podcast. I do this for plain HTML sites to get a
"most recent updates" RSS feed from their embedded metadata, but tht
doesn't need the sophisitication of podcast markup.

 

[Peter Flynn]

Yeah, I don;'t know how to write script.

OK, first thing: go learn how to write scripts.
This is pretty much essential for any information-processing task:
without it you'll have to hand-edit everything, as you've discovered.

In the case of RSS, the normal expectation is that it gets generated
as part of the software which you use to update a web site. In your
case, the assumption would be that you have your videos and mp3s listed
in some kind of database, and that you have a report-generator which
creates the HTML page that you publish, complete with links.

If you're doing it entirely by hand, now is a good time to rethink this
method, and have a look at automating it. PHP is one possibility, as
are the various Unix shell languages, or JSP, or ASP; or a purely XML
based system such as AxKit or Cocoon (probably overkill for this). Or
just install a blogging system and use that (they all generate RSS).

///Peter