RSS - Publishing Your Feed

Publishing Your Feed

There are a number of ways to generate a feed from your content. First of all, explore your content management system - it might already have an option to generate an RSS feed.

If that option isn’t available, you have a number of choices;

    Self-scraping — The easiest way to publish a feed from existing content. Scraping tools fetch your Web page and pull out the relevant parts for the feed, so that you don’t have to change your publishing system. Some use regular expressions or XPath expressions, while others require you to mark up your page with minimal hints (usually using <div> or tags) that help it decide what should be put into the feed.
    Feed integration — If your site is dynamically generated (using languages like Perl, Python or PHP), it may have a RSS library available, so that you can integrate the feed into your publishing process.
    Starting with the feed — Alternatively, you can manage the list-oriented parts of your content in the RSS feed itself, and generate your Web pages (as well as other content, like e-mail lists) from the feed. This has the advantage of always having the correct information in the feed, and tools like XSLT make this option easy, especially if you’re starting from scratch.
    Third party scraping — If none of these options work for you, some people on the Web will scrape your site for you and make the feed available. Be warned, however, that this is never as reliable or accurate as doing it yourself, because they don’t know the details of your content or your system. Also, using third parties introduces another point of failure in the delivery process; problems there (network, server or business) will cause your feed to be unavailable.

source: https://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/#telling-people-about-your-feed