---
title: "Creating your own RSS Feed"
date: 2006-12-05
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $('#toc').toc({ minimumHeaders: 3, listType: 'ul', showSpeed: 0, headers: '#content h2, #content h3, #content h4, #content h5, #content h6' }); /*..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2006/12/05/creating-your-own-rss-feed/index.html
---

> For AI agents: a documentation index is available at https://idratherbewriting.com/llms.txt. Markdown versions of all pages are available by appending .md to any page URL.

# Creating your own RSS Feed

If you have a traditional website, you can still create an RSS feed for it. The feed file is incredibly simple -- see this site: [http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2175271](http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2175271)

Basically the RSS files consists of just a few tags: title, description, and link. Each of these three tags is nested in an item tag. All the items collectively are nested in a channel tag. And then there are some generic statements at the top, and a closing rss tag at the bottom. Here are some other resources in creating an RSS file:

**Create your feed by filling in a form:**[http://www.webdevtips.co.uk/webdevtips/codegen/rss.shtml](http://www.webdevtips.co.uk/webdevtips/codegen/rss.shtml)

Strangely, the feed generator added a line of code at the top that made the feed invalid. Easily delete it, though.

**Validate your feed:**[http://feedvalidator.org](http://feedvalidator.org/)

XML doesn't allow any errors, so if you messed up one tag, the entire feed doesn't show. That's why it's important to validate the feed.

**Convert RSS feed to Javascript so you can paste into an HTML site:** [http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/p/138.html](http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/p/138.html) If you use SharePoint, you can add an RSS feed to it easily via the Smiling Goat Feedreader Web part. Only one major flaw: the Smiling Goat Feedreader doesn't support authenticated feeds. To me, this makes the feedreader almost worthless, because I bet most people use SharePoint behind the company firewall -- in other words, on servers requiring authentication. The only way to get the feedreader to work is by putting your feed file on a public-accessible server. Perhaps the programmers felt this would encourage corporate transparency.

Feeddigest.com also allows you to combine different feeds, but only up to 5. After that, it's a paid model. However, the aggregated feeds are stylish and integrate easily into your site.