How To: Automated Feeds
Automated Feeds are for When the Content is Repeated from Elsewhere
An RSS feed is all about "what's new" -- the ongoing evolution of
content on your website. As you grow your website, adding new content to a
page, new pages to content sections or even adding new sections to your site,
it is important that you plan for that growth. This is what we call the Maintenance
Challenge.
 To tackle this challenge you must address who is responsible for new content
(you, your staff, departmental staff -- be very specific), what tools will
they use to create that new content (Dreamweaver, Contribute, InContext, a
database web interface), how will that new content integrate into the site,
and especially what elements of that new content need to be repeated in other
places (excerpts for the home page, title and blurb in a listing page, etc.).
Its this last piece that can be the real killer in any maintenance plan. You
have to repeat content to entice people to see that content (and someone will
forget to do it at some point) but maintenance is easiest when the content
stays in one place.
It is this inherent conflict that makes maintenance very challenging. The
more you can automate content repetition the less difficult your maintenance
task will be. RSS DreamFeeder has automation built into its core. Once a feed
has been configured it can extract new content from your website with the click
of a single button. One click and your feed will find the new pages, extract
just the content you specify, build the links and reconstruct any underlying
content linking so that they are absolute URLs and can be repeated on any website,
assemble the new content with XML and store that content within your RSS feed.
Automated feeds are best for collecting content from pages that are formatted
the same, from template-based pages, and from websites where there are many
pages to manage and many entries to add to the feed on a regular basis. Automated
feeds can also be a handy way to convert a single HTML page with multiple entries
(like a "What's New" page) into an RSS feed. The key thing to managing
an effective automated feed is building on consistency because you'll be configuring
the feed to identify content based on where it is or what it looks like (style
sheet).
To do these tutorials about creating automated feeds you'll need a few files,
so do the first tutorial here and then pick from the other ones.
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