Publish and create RSS Feeds easily on your ASP.NET websites

This article explains the concept of creating RSS feeds for your ASP.NET website with auto updating contents

Introduction

This article explains the concept of creating and publishing RSS feeds on your websites by dynamically and auto updating RSS contents driven from your database.

Many of the web application this days update their website contents frequently to attract the users at the maximum extent. Even web publishers needs to share their content without re-creating it on any form. But there is no way to inform the users about the new contents in their website. Either they have send newsletters to the users or the users have to bookmark the website URL in their browser’s favorites, which had its own drawbacks. To overcome this difficulty, Netscape introduced the concept of RSS in late 90s. It serves the information consumers and publishers to stay up to date with their desired website's content.

What is RSS?

RSS, can be expanded as Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a lightweight XML format for distributing regularly changed web contents among different web sites and users. A Web site can allow the users or other sites to publish some of its content by creating an RSS feeds.

Once you create the RSS Feeds, all your website users can subscribe the feeds and publish the feeds into their news reader or into their website. So instead of having to browse each individual site for the news, they can just import into their RSS reader all the RSS feeds. A good example of site that using RSS heavily is Google News. With google news, you can see news from around the world in one simple page. The main concept behind the Google News is subscribe RSS feeds from all major news provider around the world. Lots of article driven websites these days will provide RSS feeds on their website.

RSS Feeds Structure

If you check most of the website RSS Feeds, you can see that the output of the Feeds is just an XML File with certain tags. RSS itself is basically a creation of well formed XML file in a pre defined format.

The basic main RSS tags are shown below

<rss version="2.0">

<channel>

 ......

channel>