Techniques to write RSS Feed

Definition of RSS feed
RSS is an abbreviation of Really Simple Syndication. According to Harvard it is a web content syndication format. This format is used for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites. It is written in Xtensified markup language (XML) to have an update of latest information on the website.
RSS feed can check for changes, if the changes are made then the changes are appropriately displayed in the area where this RSS feed is utilized.
Formats in RSS
There are three widely used RSS formats RSS 0.91,1.0 and 2.0 being the latest.
This is a case sensitive language, thus be careful with capital cased letters.
Step by Step procedure to create an RSS feed on the website
Before starting to write an RSS, we need to understand that there are several formats of RSS, we shall be formulating the steps taking RSS 2.0 format into consideration.

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Channel is a component where mandatory and optional fields are declared.
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Channel contains items in which each news item is drafted independently. Ex:
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Step 1: There are certain mandatory fields and certain optional fields in writing RSS. Identify the mandatory RSS feed items
1. Title : This is how people refer the website from another website. This title should be same as the title of the page that the RSS is pointing.
2. Link: URL of the corresponding website
3. Description: Phrases or sentences that speaks about the website and summarizes the content. This should be opted to be same as the metatag content description for a better SEO. Ex:
Affordable Website for Small Business
Step 2: Identify the optional fields that are necessary in writing a good RSS
• Language: if the website is English or Spanish, this will tell to the person who is posting the rss feed about the language of the website. By knowing he can post all the similar language rss feeds at one place. Ex:
en-us
• Copyright: reveals the copyright notice of the owner Ex:
2005 gmr web team
• managingeditor: This will contain the email id of a person to whom the content belongs to. Ex: ajay@gmrwebteam.com
• webmaster: email address of a person responsible for any technical issues relating to the rss feed. ex: webmaster@example.com
• pubDate: The publication date of the content written on the website is declared. This automatically changes for every 24 hours. The date format is confined to RFC 822 specifications.To know more about that specifications click on the http://asg.web.cmu.edu/rfc/rfc822.html. Ex:
Tue, 10 Dec 2005 04:00:00 GMT
• lastbuilddate: This indicates the last date during which the content was changed or modified. Ex:
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 09:41:01 GMT
• category: It is a good practice to categorize the item that is written in rss feed. By doing this several items with different categories can be posted in a single rss feed. Ex: Newspapers
• docs: It is a link that points to the place where rss is written, so that a person who has posted this rss in his website has an idea of from where he has copied this content. Ex: http://www.gmrwebteam.com/xml/rss1.xml
• ttl: ttl is an abbreviation of time to live. This is written in terms of minutes that indicates how long a channel can be cached before refreshing from the source. Ex: 120
• image: image has an url, title ,link, width and height. These are given to see an image displayed along with the rss feed. Ex: http://www.gmrwebteam.com/images/image1.jpg
• skipHours: this is used to have a positive effect on the bandwidth requirments of weblog. This will hint the aggregators the hours they can miss without refreshing. Ex: that says to skip hours from 6 to 11

6
7
8
9
10
11

• skipdays: similar to that of skip hours, except that it is specified in number of days
• guid: used to identify each item in a unique way.