Publishing Your Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 308

function. hen I edited each of the items to relect new content. Since I
changed the RSS feed weekly, it was easy to keep up with.

Once you've generated your RSS feed, upload it to your site. And then check
to make sure that it works.

testing your rSS feed
To test your RSS feed, use Feed Validator at feedvalidator.org. Enter the
URL where you uploaded the feed and Feed Validator will tell you if it's
okay or not. If it's not, Feed Validator will tell you why. I do this every week,
too; here are some common problems I run into.

. Unencoded characters. Some characters have to be properly encoded
before you can include them in an RSS feed. he one that trips me up
is the ampersand ( & ). he proper way to encode it is by using & .
(Most of the time I remember to search and replace the ampersand
with & before uploading my feed.)

Smart quotes. Sometimes I'll copy and paste something from a non-
text source (such as a quote). Sometimes those quotes will include
“smart quotes” instead of the ASCII plain quotes.

.

You can get a full list of what Feed Validator lags, as well as pointers to how
to ix the problems, at feedvalidator.org/docs/.

Making rSS feeds publishable to Web sites
RSS feeds in and of themselves are just text iles. Many of your users will
want to read them with RSS feed readers, which is okay, but some of your
readers may want to include your feed on their Web site. Or perhaps you
have many RSS feeds and you want to include feeds from one site on another
of your sites. here are several ways to do this, from installing programs on
your server to simpler solutions. Let's stick with simpler. FeedDigest can
take a feed and give you code to put your feed on a Web site.

FeedDigest
FeedDigest (feeddigest.com/) allows you to not only make a feed publish-
able but to format it and change its look and content. You start by just speci-
fying the URL for your feed. From there, you'll be given several options,