Chapter 9. Syndicating the Blog

One of the easiest ways to reach out to your users is to create an RSS feed for your blog. This is fairly simple to do, and it allows your readers to subscribe to your posts, which means they'll receive notifications whenever you post a new entry.

This is a mutually beneficial system because you, as a content provider, have the comfort of knowing that people who subscribe will likely come back to your site when you publish new content, and your readers are saved the trouble of coming to your site to find that nothing has changed.

In the course of this chapter, you'll learn several skills that will enable you to create an RSS feed for your blog:

• What RSS is, and how it works

• What XML is, and how RSS uses it

• How to create a new file to generate an RSS feed for your blog

• How to repurpose your existing functions to minimize effort

• How to use some of the methods available to publish your feed