Some Resources for RSS Generation

Needing to generate RSS feeds from search results on a customer's ASP.NET web site, I sought out some info to assist and (re)discovered the following items, which I figured were worth sharing here, if for no other reason than to give this old blog a much needed kick in the pants.

• RSS 2.0 Specification

  First stop, the specification, hosted on Harvard Law. All the necessary details available here, including some approaches for item element encoding and many improved examples.

• Mike Stall's Trivial RSS Writer

  Next stop, Mike Stall's post from a couple of years ago to get a visual on some XmlWriter logic and the custom DateTime format for conversion of UTC values into the RFC 822 compliant date/time strings expected by RSS.

• Google Blog Search Feed, Google News Search Feed, and Bing Web Search Feed

  Always look to see what the big guys are doing. These search result RSS feeds led to lots of helpful information, including opening my eyes to the differences between normal-form and encapsulated-blob feeds (Bing providing the former, Google News the latter), and also the use of existing domains for extending RSS, including using the publisher, creator, and date elements of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and the totalResults, startIndex, and itemsPerPage elements of the OpenSearch 1.1 specification.

Maybe this will get the old blog rolling again.