I’ve built a website for a web-programming class. It reads in data from a text file and builds news stories from the text file. I’ve added a page that will allow a logged in admin add news from the web. That page just writes to the text file. That is all done in perl, with some javascript validation.

I’m interested in building an RSS feed, mostly for the educational value, to allow people to subscribe to our news posts.

~~

I want to create an xml file with the RSS 2.0 specs*. I can build some kind of perl/javascript thing to parse this new xml and output the news as content on our html page. That part isn’t particularly complicated, but the only reason I want to use the xml is for an RSS feed. So once I’ve got this xml file… would I just link to it to allow people subscribe to it? And how would I trigger an update? (i.e. how do I get the RSS feed reader to say news(1)?)

* If you’re curious, I’m going to build a short program to read in the current text file and output an xml file

I know this is probably a very inefficient way of doing things, I just wanted to do it so I could finally do some stuff with rss feeds.

Topics: programming, RSS, web 2.0, JavaScript, web development, web apps, Perl