I’ve been chatting to a friend about how to incorporate RSS with an existing site, and ways in which the technology can be applied.
You almost always hear about RSS being used where the XML is generated server-side using a technology like ASP.NET or PHP and querying a database. This is fairly familiar if you’re a programmer, or using a blogging product. However if you have an existing static site without a database, it seems like quite a lot of hassle to go down this route simply to provide an information feed.
However, RSS just requires an XML document that adheres to a particular format to be accessible via HTTP. There is no reason why this can’t be a static document that is maintained like any other static resource on your site.
For some reason I hadn’t really even thought about that before – I’d always figured that manually maintaining an XML document isn’t really a fun night out for most people. However, there are various utilities available which put a friendly interface on top of the generation of an XML document using the RSS schema. Some also have FTP features so that you can upload and replace an existing hosted feed file.
I think it’s definately less maintenance long term if you auto-generate your feed from a database, but if you have hosting constraints or just want to offer RSS without getting at all complex I think this can be a really good approach.
