Saturday, October 26, 2013

RSS feeds: I give up

Trying to figure out how to create an RSS feed for a podcast. This is partially for a friend and partially because I wanted to figure out how to do it.

 It is a PITA!

 I wrote the following code:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version=”2.0”>
<channel>
<title>Friend</title>
<description>Friend talks about everything</description>
<link>http://website with list of podcasts.html </link>
<item>
<title>Podcast 10-1-2013</title)
<description>Friend talks about stuff</description>
<link>http://server link to mp3 file</link>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Nothing. It looks identical to various examples provided on the websites I have looked at, yet I run it through various validation websites and get incomprehensible errors.  I have changed virtually every line, adding things suggested by various websites, nothing.

I taught myself to write HTML code by reading a book, but I can't find a single useful website that accurately tells me how to do something  as simple as create an RSS feed.

They must be skipping some simple step that they think is obvious but isn't to someone who hasn't done it before.  Maybe it's as simple as where the files are located but no one says anything about it.

It's quite frustrating.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the line:
<title>Podcast 10-1-2013</title)
The ')' should be a '>'

Also on the first two lines you're using curly quotes, but XML will only accept standard quotes: "

E.g:
<rss version=”2.0”>
becomes:
<rss version="2.0">

Everything else looks fine.

heresolong said...

Huh. I had no idea there were two kinds of quotes. I'll give that a shot. Thanks for noticing the > mistake.