Guest Author - Christopher Combs

Ok, I am going to show you how to enhance the RSS Feed by using ASP with IIS. Please review the following article that shows you how to setup your basic RSS Feed. http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art30642.asp.

Now, to enhance this, you can add additional features that way when the RSS reader downloads the document like Additional comments or the date the article was published and who the author was.



Here is the basics of a RSS File in its native XML format:

<%?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rss version="0.92">
<channel>
<title>ASP @ BellaOnline - Enhanced</title>
<link>http://www.bellaonline.com</link>
<description>ASP Site for BellaOnline.com</description>
<copyright>Copyright 2006</copyright>
<ttl>20 <lastBuildDate>Fri, 22 September 2006 09:00:00 GMT</lastBuildDate>
<webMaster>asp@bellaonline.com (ASP BellaOnline)</webMaster>
<item>
<description>Description information goes here</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Now, to really harness the power of RSS, you can create this dynamically from your database. Let’s say you have a frontend program which can be a web page. And it allows you to add new entries to your database. And these articles you want all users to access and view. The best part is you can automate the whole thing. If you reviewed the article from above, you will see that you can add dynamic elements to your RSS file. Also, if you have configured your webserver, (I will be posting another article on how to do this), to treat the RSS format as the ASP format the RSS reader will do the rest!

See the next Article below for the enhanced version.

Enhanced RSS Code Using ASP