HOW-​​TO Create an RSS Feed

This is a short guide to creating an RSS feed for sites that don’t have one. I’ve posted it here because I keep for­get­ting how to do it. Hope it’s useful. NB: it won’t work for sites that require a log-​​on, such as Facebook groups.

Step One: Problem Pages

I try to remember to visit the site of my old col­leagues at startups.co.uk for news related to starting online busi­nesses. The reporting is good quality and they quite often get stories that aren’t covered in my regular reading. However, they don’t have an RSS feed and so it falls outside my regular updates through Google Reader.

Copy the address of the page you want to generate a feed for to the clip­board. It needs to be the page that lists all the recent stories on the site, or section of the site, not one of the pages for indi­vidual stories.

Step Two: Go to FeedYes

The free online service FeedYes creates feeds from pages that don’t offer one. There are various other altern­at­ives, but this one works, so I’ve stuck with it. You have to register to use it, but this takes five seconds, and you could even use a fake email address if you wanted.

Step Three: Create a new FeedYes Feed

It’s the first option in the nav­ig­a­tion. Here you enter the address you copied from the site. Also give it a tag, such as ‘internet’ and specify the language, if it isn’t English.

Step Four: Prune the Feed

FeedYes grabs all the links on the page and creates a list. You then click on the first item on the list that is a proper news item, rather than a static link such as a nav­ig­a­tion link or special feature. In the next step, you click on the last item that contains news. This allows the service to identify the code that indic­ates a news item.

Step Five: Save the Feed Address

The service gives you an address that looks some­thing like this:

http://www.feedyes.com/feed.php?f=aJEC6T5Uz0h52Rfj

You can use FeedYes as an RSS reader, but I can’t really recom­mend that. Instead, copy the address to the clip­board and switch to your normal reader (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines, or an offline reader) and choose the option to add a new feed.

Paste in the address and …Ta-​​da! You’re done. You’ll notice that unless you’re very lucky, you won’t end up with a full content feed — it depends on how much is printed on the page you’re working from. Nonetheless, it means that you are now getting updates from sites that oth­er­wise might have fallen off your radar.

If you work on an older site yourself, you could use this method to generate a feed for your own news pages. If that’s the case, I’d recom­mend putting the feed URL through the feed­burner service to give it a slightly more elegant address, such as mybrand.feedburner.com. You can also add niceties such as a custom logo and options like ‘digg this’ and ‘add to del.icio.us’ to each story.

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Possibly related:

• Everyone a Re-​​​​Publisher
• No Feed
• The Basics: Your Office on the Web