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CREATING RSS FEEDS
Two Kinds of RSS Feeds
Before we jump in and start creating RSS feeds, we need to consider what kind of feed will suit our purposes. Red Queen allows us to choose between two basic feed content types. One content type is the review. The other is the review item (or product catalog if dealing with merchandise). A review-based feed carries reviews for review items pulled according to some selection criteria. For instance, the items might be selected based on a search query performed with a specified keyword. Or the items might belong to a particular category. More on the selection criteria later. The other feed type, the item-based feed carries no reviews, only an item title and a description, and possibly an average customer rating for the item.
Without understanding the psychology of a particular RSS feed audience it is impossible to say which of the two feed types will receive more subscriptions. Unless you already have very good insight into how your readers think, you will likely have to publish both feed content types and monitor subscriptions to each to find out which "works best". Feed monitoring is a separate topic in itself, and will be discussed later, when we consider syndication in detail. It is also true that the selection criteria used to define your feeds will have a strong bearing on the degree to which they are subscribed.
Creating An RSS Feed
To create an rss feed using Red Queen, first go to the Configure control panel and look for the RSS Management link on the left side of the page. This leads to the control panel for RSS feed creation, activation, and deletion.
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Fill out the form as appropriate for the kind of RSS feed you intend to create. In this case we:
- Select Item Review as the feed type as we wish to create a feed of reviews associated with records from the Item Table.
- If this was NOT the first time we had created a feed we would be able to base our new feed on an existing one, and would be able to select one of those feeds from the second drop-down menu. This saves time as it pre-populates the forms on the next page with information that we are likely going to use in setting up the new feed. But you can always ignore this option and fill out everything from scratch each time if it suits you.
- Each RSS feed needs a UNIQUE IDENTIFIER, or name. This is used to name the rss file and allow you (and others) to recognize the feed by name. Make this a descriptive name that precisely specifies the nature of the feed. The identifier is used for the anchor text of the RSS feed when displayed on the RSS Syndication page, so make it user friendly and informative. In this case we have chosen to call the feed Latest Reviews of DVD Animation Titles.
It should be noted that this contro panel is used to create feeds, not edit them. If you decide after creating a feed that there is something you need to change about it, go to the Database control panel, pull up the RSS table and go to work.
When we proceed to the next step we see a larger form that completely specifies the nature of the RSS feed we intend to create. Most of the time you will have pre-populated this page by basing the new feed on an existing one, and then you will only need to customize a few parts of it. Here is what our form might look like filled out from scratch for our prospective Latest Reviews of DVD Animation Titles feed:
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There are quite a few variable to provide when fully specifying the feed, so let's go through them:
- The first variable, the type of thing described is presently used only to remind us about the nature of the objects behind the feed. It does not appear in the feed itself.
- Feeds can be populated in several ways, depending on whether we are dealing with plain review item feeds or feeds of reviews. In the latter case, the only option currently is to populate the feed with the most recent reviews. In the former case, when dealing with item feeds, we can restrict the selection of items to those that match a supplied search keyword, or even to those that happen to be "featured" items.
- If we want to restrict the review items to a particular container we can do so by specifying the ID of the container (the integer ID). Else leave it blank.
- If we create a large number of feeds we will benefit from a classification scheme of some sort. This will allow us to group feeds by a header (such as Disney or Fox Classics) on the Syndication page. These classifications can be added to the RSSGrouping table beforehand. If no groupings are available, this input field will be absent from the form.
- The title of the feed is a required element. It appears in the feed. It need not be the same as the unique string used to identify the feed, though this will be used to populate the form initially. The title will appear at the top of the RSS feed, and tells readers what kind of items they are looking at.
- Oftentimes the feed description will not be published when a webmaster displays a feed on their site. But this variable is required nonetheless. It might be used by a sole subscriber to the feed who adds it to their RSS reader.
- The default number of items in a feed is 15. You can specify more or less.
- You should provide an email address at which you may be contacted if an RSS subscriber has questions about the feed.
- The category field is somewhat nebulous in an RSS feed. If you think the items in your feed can be well described by a short string, use it here.
- The ttl field, or time to live specifies how long an RSS Reader should cache the feed, so that it need not retrieve the feed from your site. This time is specified in minutes. So 1440 if you publish your feed daily.
- Select the primary language of your feed.
- If you have a small logo that can accompany the title of your feed when displayed in a client RSS reader, add it here.
- Each feed makes use of an XSL template to format the feed when displayed on your site. Choose an appropriate template (or use the one suggested). There is one main XSL template for reviews, and one for each of the item, member, and supplier types when creating review item feeds.
- Select the column from which an individual <item> title is to be selected.
- Select the column from which an individual <item> description is to be selected.
- The description field can be truncated in order to force a reader to return to your site to read the remainder. This field is measured in the number of characters to display.
- If you intend to provide custom fields in your RSS feeds you can have Red Queen export these fields to the feeds. For example, if you added price and run_time columns to your Item table to better characterized your DVDs, you could add these values to the feed (formatting them is another story--study the XSL templates for clues).
When you have completely specified the RSS feed, click on the Create Feed button to add it to the RSS table.
Next Section: PUBLISHING RSS FEEDS
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