RSS writers

[wecando.biz]

Hi all

Has anyone here any experience of RSS writers? We are keen to make available to RSS readers the Biz Needs section of our website, but I have no experience of what RSS writer to use. My preference would be a free one we can add to our PHP based site, but I'll pay for one if recommended.

Also, I would like to offer an RSS feeds of our members Biz Feeds so that they can get instant notification of peopl eviewing their business profile, searching on businesses like theirs etc. However, this information is only accessible after logging in. So does anyone know how we could push that through RSS?

My thanks in advance.

Regards

IH

[fisicx]

The whole point of RSS is encapsulated in it's name: Really simple Syndication.

It's an XML system that strips the content and news from a blog or other source that update regularly. It's not designed for individual feeds (but it is possible), it's really so that people can use an RSS reader to scan new posts, news and information in order to determine what they want to read in full.

You don't need a RSS writer, just the RSS feed. Integrating it into your site however could be tricky because of the way RSS works however, I did find this for you: rss-writer. Still need to generate the XML pages though.

Hope it helps - sorry if this was an egg sucking lesson.

[wecando.biz]

That's helpful Graham, thank you. I have since found this too:

http://www.google.com/custom?domains...D%3A1%3B&hl=en

It's a bunch of PHP classes which should help us do it.

The idea is to be able to feed the Biz Feeds of a specific user to their reader, plus the Biz Needs people are entering on our site to third party sites which are interested in passing that content on as potential business leads for their members.

Assuming the RSS feeder is easyish to implement we could have both happening within a few weeks I reckon.

Thanks again.

IH

UPDATE: Graham, your link seems to suggest that many webservers come with an RSS feeder as an inbuilt capability and that an RSS writer is what would be used to manually convert an XML file to RSS. Do you (or does anyone else) know if Apache has an inbuilt RSS feeder?

[wecando.biz]

Our Biz Needs RSS feed is now live and can be viewed at http://www.wecando.biz/rss/bizneeds.php . Feedback welcomed. One thing isn't working as I would like and that is for the FROM field in RSS readers to show as from the member name, not from "Biz Needs" but we can't work out what tag we use to affect this. Any ideas?

IH