[The Infinity]

I am hoping to revamp the RSS feed that I have on my Website and forums.

My website is located at http://softhardware.net/

and

My forums are located at http://forums.softhardware.net/
-------------------------------

I am hoping to give my members a better RSS feed considering the one we currently have is kinda, well.... weak.

I was hoping some of you guys could give me some ideas of what to add to the RSS feeds. For the website I was hoping to add a channel for "Latest Guides" where it would automatically change and show the newest Guides I have put on my website.

For the forums I was hoping to have a latest threads RSS feed, for both of these though, I have no idea where to start. If anyone has any other ideas of how I could get my RSS feeds kickin, please let me know

[Eriksrocks]

Are you looking for more ideas or how to actually do it?
Are you running a CMS? Some have the ability to create RSS feeds built in.
I would recommend adding those sweet little buttons to services like Bloglines and Google Reader - they make it look cool but they're also handy for your readers.

Otherwise, the best way to "do it" for the guides in my opinion would just be to copy and paste and update it manually.

[The Infinity]

Well I know how to do what I have on there right now, but I'm not sure how to do much more of it.

http://news.com.com/2547-1_3-0-20.xml

They have an amazing rss feed.

Are you running a CMS?

Not sure actually what that is lol.

[watchintv]

A CMS stands for "Content Management System". Some popular ones are Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc...

[covert215]

I would put a techguy affilliate logo up....I would recommend this code

<a href="http://www.techguy.org/"><img src="http://www.techguy.org/remotelinks/images/blogger.gif" alt="Tech Support Guy" border="0"></a>

from here

Anyways, what info do you want in the feed?

[Eriksrocks]

Originally Posted by The Infinity

They have an amazing rss feed.

In terms of the content in the feed, or the styling you get when you visit that page?

The styling can be easily accomplished with CSS (create a CSS file and link to it from the XML file).

As far as the content, I'm sure they have an aggregator system that takes all of the articles and content and puts it into one feed.

[covert215]

You do not use CSS with XML. You use XSL (eXtensible Style Language), which has the branches:

* XSLT - a language for transforming XML documents
* XPath - a language for navigating in XML documents
* XSL-FO - a language for formatting XML documents


XSL-FO and XSLT are the main ones used for styling. XSL encompasses all of them, but the divisions have more specific uses. W3Schools has tutorials on all of them.

http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/xsl_languages.asp

[covert215]

Look at XSL-FO. I skimmed the tutorial and looks to be EXACTLY what you are looking for. The second to last page will tie together everything you need.

[Eriksrocks]

Well I believe CSS works.
If you're right, then the Official Google Blog would be formatting their feed incorrectly?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

The first couple lines:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.blogger.com/styles/atom.css" type="text/css"?>

[covert215]

I'm not sure why that is...maybe it is specific for Atom feeds.

[covert215]

Check out this site.

http://interglacial.com/~sburke/stuff/pretty_rss.html

It goes into making RSS feeds look good, and it tells the difference between CSS and XSL.

The XSL language is rather more complex than CSS because it is meant for something more potentially complex: taking any kind of XML and turning into just about anything else.

Atom.css is a unique file that allows you to enhance your feed from what I could gather.


And for the official word, from the W3C-
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS-vs-XSL

[The Infinity]

Alright thanks, I'll give it a look.