Winternet

I created an RSS feed for one of my recent projects at work. Boston University News has a feed here:
Subscribe to Boston University News

We use PHP and templates to drive the dynamic sites we create. So providing a new RSS feed was pretty easy, all the scripts were already written to get the information from the database. We just needed to come up with a template RSS file to put that information into. So the hardest part was trying to choose among the conflicting “standards” that are out there.

I liked RSS 2.0; it seemed like the clearest. But, since an individual news release can have more than one author, we couldn’t use the author sub-element of item. Items in RSS 2.0 are assumed to have a single author, no collaborators. So we used dc:creator in a way that may or may not be supported by your aggregator. This was based on a post from RSS-Dev which I can’t find at the moment. We also used dc:date also based on research that I can’t find now.