Please DO Feed the Sites: Introduction

It's been pointed out to me recently, and rightly so, that although I've been telling everyone how important it is to have and promote and use RSS feeds for their sites, I haven't stopped to explain anything about how one would actually go about doing that. Personally, I recommend the use of RSS Pixy Dust, but, if you don't happen to have that available, it gets a little more complicated.

I've decided that the best way to provide a useful explanation that will satisfy the most people is to break the whole thing up into a series of articles that I'm calling Please DO Feed the Sites. In this way, people can look for the parts they need, and, if I should miss something, I can just tag it on later as an extra part. Currently, I have it planned as follows:

• Part 1: Introduction (You're reading it now.)
• Part 2: What Is RSS?
• Part 3: Creating Outgoing Feeds
• Part 4: Using Incoming Feeds

If I can get the time (and there's enough interest,) I will continue the series by showing you the creation of a hand-coded and maintained RSS feed which may be a possible working solution for some sites. I will also try to move on to a walkthrough demonstration showing the creation of database-driven, dynamically maintained and updated RSS feeds. I may also add other parts later.

I'm aiming high with this, but, again, it depends on the kind of response I get. If this is the kind of useful content that you want to see here, then you gotta let me know.

Thank you all, code well, and good night.