RSS Project!

Editor illustration

Instructions:

Here is a sample RSS feed that I borrowed from ARS Technica. I cut out all the extra computer-generated tags that were automatically added by Wordpress so we're left with just the basic tags that are the bare minimum typically used in an RSS feed.

What I want you to do is remix this project and find the favorites.xml file. Remix the xml code so it has six of your own favorite subjects (music, movies, video games, whatever.) Keep in mind that RSS feeds are meant to be Really Simple, so this means that you only need:

  • The XML declaration at the top
  • The RSS tag containing...
  • The channel tag containing...
  • Six item tags containing...
  • Either a title tag OR a description tag

That's it! Nothing else is required. Just delete any additional tags that you didn't use. For fun, see if you can include a picture as well in the image tag. You'll have to upload your own image to the assets folder to do this.

You can check to see if you did it right by just loading the XML file in another tag. Chrome can tell you if it can read the XML file or if there are errors.

One last note: the CDATA tag is a way of telling the browser that anything between the “<![CDATA[” and the “]]>” is just plain text and not to treat it like XML. So for example, quotes and angle brackets are ignored and won't throw an error. You don't need to use it unless you are getting an error in your title or description.