It’s simple enough to read feeds (see our five minute guide) but how do you go about creating one for your own site?

Well, one way would be simply to enter all the necessary XML code into a text editor (Notepad will do) and upload it to your site. In fact, that wouldn’t be too onerous a task - assuming that you have some basic knowledge of XML and the RSS or Atom formats.

There are much simpler ways of doing it, however. Using a dedicated feed creation program, you can just fill in a few fields to specify thing such as the headings and text of each new item and the web page to which it is linked then click a button to upload it automatically. Not only is that much simpler than coding in XML but it is also considerably less error prone.

If you are addicted to hand-coding XML, you may want to skip this feature. If, on the other hand, you just want the simplest and fastest way to get your feed online, read on…

ListGarden
Free
http://www.softwaregarden.com
Platforms: Windows, OS X, Unix/Linux
Supports: RSS 2.0

ListGarden runs inside a web browser. A set of buttons lets you select tabbed ‘pages’ devoted to the Feed, Items or Publishing. Here I am creating a new item by filling in some text fields.

ListGarden is an easy to use RSS feed generator which runs inside a web browser. Created by Dan Bricklin (inventor of VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet) it lets you create and maintain multiple feeds and publish them either locally to your hard disk or remotely (by FTP) to your web site.

The user interface is divided into separate tabbed ‘pages’. To create a new feed you enter a name in the first page. Any feeds which already exist are listed on this page and you can select one of them should you wish to edit it.

Editing a feed is done in the second page. This shows a list of the existing items in the selected feed. To create a new item you click the Add button. This displays a form with a number of blank fields into which the information for the new item is entered. The vital fields are Title, Link and Description. In the Title field you enter the text (normally one line) which will be displayed in a list of RSS items when the feed is viewed in a reader application. The description (normally a few lines of text) which will be displayed when the user highlights that item’s title in an RSS reader. The link is the web page which will be loaded if the user wishes to read more - often by double-clicking the item title in the RSS reader.

When you’ve finished, you can publish your RSS feed in the form of an XML file saved to your hard disk, plus an optional human-readable HTML version in a second file if you wish. These can then be uploaded to your web site using a standalone FTP program. Alternatively, if you provide ListGarden with the relevant FTP information it can publish your feed direct to your web site.

Overall, ListGarden is easy to use and provides a good range of features for creating and publishing simple feeds ‘by hand’. Not only is the application itself free to use but its source code (Perl) is also freely available. The Windows version, incidentally, includes a Perl runtime so once you’ve installed it, you are all ready to go. You can also run ListGarden on a remote server displayed locally in your web browser.

There is one irritating feature of the web browser interface. Namely, when you launch ListGarden it inserts itself an active window of your web browser if you happen to be using the browser at the time. This means that you ‘lose’ the page you were currently viewing (which, in my experience, is often the page containing the data forming the basis of the item I was just about to add to the RSS feed). While this is not an insurmountable problem it is strangely annoying.

Some RSS features require a bit of hand coding. For example, in order to add an image to the feed you have to write some lines of XML

There are also a few other deficiencies. For example, ListGarden doesn’t have a built-in image options to let you display a small logo with your feed items. Unsupported features such as images and copyrights can be added by writing XML code snippets but this is hardly in tune with ListGarden’s ‘user friendly’ approach. Another deficiency is its inability to import an existing feed. ListGarden maintains the feed data in a structured text file. While it exports this data to XML it cannot read in XML which means that you cannot simply import an RSS file created by some other application. A new version of ListGarden (1.3.1) has recently been released. This release includes a variety of new features such as support for podcasting and an automatic backup option.

Summary: ListGarden is a free, easy-to-use, multi-platform feed generator whose interface is hosted in a web browser. Lacks dedicated support for a few features such as images and cannot load RSS feeds created by other applications.

FeedForAll
$39.95
http://www.feedforall.com/
Platforms: Windows or Mac
Supports: RSS 2.0 (plus RSS 0.9x and limited Atom .3 support)

FeedForAll has a neat tabbed user interface with separate pages devoted to feeds, items and images. It even has a built-in spelling checker which lets you fix spelling errors as you type.

FeedForAll is a good-looking and fully featured feed generating tool which runs as a standalone application. While both versions can be used for podcasting, the Mac version also has specific support for Apple’s iTunes; this support is promised for the Windows version too in the near future.

You can either use FeedForAll to create a feed from scratch or you can load up an existing feed created by some other program. This gives it a distinct advantage over ListGarden which cannot load an RSS file created by a different application. The software can also correct errors in the XML format in order to ‘repair’ a malformed feed. However, we did encounter one problem. The version tested does not support UTF-8 characters. This means that characters such as ‘smart quotes’ and some non-English characters will be translated into ‘foreign’ symbols when imported. The company tells me that this problem is currently being addressed and an update which supports UTF-8 will be released soon.

The user interface is divided into three tabbed pages. You can create multiple feeds which are listed in the first page. The items of a feed are added in the second page while the third page is used to add an optional image. The item editor even includes an American English spelling checker. Misspellings are highlighted and corrections can be made by making selections from a popup menu or from a dialog box.

You add an image by specifying the URL of a picture which has previously been uploaded to the web and the software automatically enters its dimensions. It also has a built-in editor to rotate, resize and crop the image; the edited image can then be uploaded directly to a web site. Incidentally, FeedForAll can also export a feed as HTML, JavaScript (in which items are displayed using the document.write() function), text or a comma delimited (CSV) file.

You can not only add an image to a feed, you can even resize and rotate it. Notice that I’ve chosen one of FeedForAll’s alternative ‘skins’ here to change the appearance of the interface.

For newcomers to RSS, a wizard is provided to create a feed by stepping through a series of dialogs, filling in information such as the feed name, home page and items, when prompted. Alternatively, you can just select File,New and use the program’s standard interface to add all the necessary data.

Overall, this is a lovely little program which offers great support for RSS 2.0, has a very nice user interface and has lots of handy extras including integrated XML and HTML editors plus a Smart Date feature which automatically sets the publication date of items (as they appear in the feed) to a preset value - handy if you prepare the feed in advance of its publication. For aesthetically conscious users there is even a range of ‘skins’ (many of which are very slick indeed) to customise the appearance of the program. Nice!

Summary: This one will cost you. However, if you want a well-featured, good-looking and efficient fed generator, you may feel that the price is reasonable. All in all, a joy to use.

FeedEdit 1.01
Free
http://www.mypage.tsn.cc/steve/feededit.htm
Platforms: Windows with .NET
Supports: RSS 2.0

FeedEdit lists the items in your feed in the left-hand pane and you can add the data in the fields on two tabbed pages on the right

This is a simple and straightforward feed generator. It supports all elements of the RSS 2.0 specification but doesn’t have any extra tools such as image editors or spelling checkers. Moreover, I found that you have to take some care when entering details of an item. If you select another item or click the Add Item button to create a new item, all the details you just entered will be lost. To avoid losing data, you must be sure to click the ‘Apply’ button first. I must confess that I keep forgetting to do this so frequently and end up having to enter data twice.

Properties of the feed itself are entered into a three-tabbed dialog. Here, for example, I am entering the details of the image which will be displayed with each item in the feed

FeedEdit can load existing RSS feeds for editing but it only allows you to have one feed loaded at a time. You can’t switch from one feed to the next by making a selection as in many rival products. Once you’ve created or edited a feed it can be saved to disk but cannot be automatically uploaded., You will need a separate FTP program for that.

Summary: Overall, while this program is reasonably easy to use it is comparatively under-featured. So while it’s not bad, it’s not remarkably good either.

FeedSpring
Free
http://www.usablelabs.com/productFeedSpring.html
Supports: RSS 2.0
Platform: Windows

FeedSpring is a simple, no frills, RSS generator which displays the list of items in a feed along with some basic information on each

This is another fairly simple standalone feed generator. Currently it supports RSS 2.0 only and runs exclusively on Windows. However, support for other RSS formats is promised and versions of the program for Linux, FreeBSD and MacOS are in development. The Python source code is available for download.

FeedSpring shows all the items in a pane with basic information displayed alongside. Data entry for each item is done in a popup dialog. Another dialog is used to set properties of the feed itself. The dialog is divided into tabbed pages with the required data on the first page and optional data such as image and copyright on other pages. There is an XML and HTML viewer built-in to the program but no code editors. You will also need a separate FTP program to upload the feed.

You can add or edit an item using this dialog. Basic information is entered in the first tabbed page and optional information such as the author’s email address can be added in the other pages

While FeedSpring can read in feeds created by other applications, it can be overly sensitive to XML problems (or at least, what it considers to be ‘problems’). When I attempt to load some feeds it reports the error “Text instance has no attribute ‘tagName’” - whatever that means! I should say I have loaded these ‘problem’ feeds into FeedEdit and FeedForAll without any errors. Worst of all, instead of recovering gracefully from this error, the entire FeedSpring program just bombs out.

Summary: Again, while it may seem churlish to criticise a free program, FeedSpring strikes me as merely adequate.

Overall...

There are many feed generation programs available in addition to those listed above. If you are familiar with XML and are prepared to put a little effort into studying the RSS or Atom specifications, you could even create a feed using a text or programming editor or a web design tool such as Dreamweaver.

Speaking personally, however, I prefer to have a program that takes the hard work out of feed creation. So far, I’ve found two that really fill the bill: ListGarden has the great benefit of being both easy to use and free. Moreover, it’s multi-platform - Windows, OS X and Unix/Linux. True, it lacks a few bells and whistles and may occasionally require that you hand edit certain XML fragments. Moreover, it can’t import existing feeds; the only way to do that is to copy and paste the information for each separate item. Still, it’s a very useful and effective program - and, like I said, it’s free.

If you don’t mind paying for your feed generator, on the other hand, FeedForAll would be a great choice. Available for the Windows or Mac, this has a beautiful, simple user interface and has all the bells and whistles that ListGarden lacks. Currently it has a problem with importing UTF-8 characters. Once this is fixed (soon, we are assured), FeedForAll will be hard to beat.

What is in an RSS Feed?

An RSS feed can be thought of as a combination of two main components - the Feed itself and the Items it contains. The third component, the Image, is optional. For more detailed information, see our Quick Guide To RSS and Atom.

1. The Feed

Here are the names of some feeds displayed in a feed reader application. These feeds have been grouped into categories such as 'Computers' and 'News'. The figures alongside show the number of unread items followed by the total number of items in the feed

Think of an RSS feed as a sort of electronic newspaper or magazine. The feed is like the newspaper itself. It has a title such as The New York Times, Le Monde or MyFeed. If you want to read it regularly, you can have the newspaper or magazine to delivered to your door by placing a regular order with your newsagent or by placing a subscription with the publisher. In the same way you subscribe to a feed by adding the feed’s name and address (e.g. http://www.bitwisemag.com/rss/feed.xml) to your RSS reader. The content of a feed is contained within a ‘channel’. Unless referring specifically to the XML structure of a feed (in which the ‘channel’ is a specific element), the terms ‘feed’ and ‘channel’ can be regarded as synonymous.

2. The Items

Having selected a feed (here, Bitwise) in my feed reader, I can now browse the item headers. Here the headers shown in bold are the items I have not yet read. Typically the text description of the selected item will be displayed in another pane of your reader

The items are the individual articles. Each item or article has a title such as ‘Price of Muffins Soars, Shock!’ or ‘Learn to Program a Time Machine in VB’. In a newspaper (printed or online) often the title of these articles appear on the front page along with a brief description. If the description whets your appetite you turn to a specific page to read the full article. So it is with the items of an RSS feed. Each item has a title and a description. The RSS reader displays the titles and descriptions of new items. To read the full article you generally click a link (or double-click the title) in your RSS reader to display the associated web page.

3. The Image

A small image to be displayed with feed items is optional. Here you can see the Bitwise image, top-left, as displayed by the SharpReader application. The feed name and the item title are shown alongside while the item description is displayed below

That just leaves the third principal component of an RSS feed - the image. Many feeds display a small graphic logo at the top of each item’ description. This image is purely optional but is useful if you want to make sure that readers can instantly identify the source of each item. Some readers may subscribe to numerous feeds so, in the absence of an image, it may not be obvious which feed is responsible for the currently selected item.

Huw Collingbourne

August 2005