What’s in your RSS feed – Items, Title, Description

Items are the next part of your RSS feed that we will discuss. Items are contained within channels in your feed. A valid feed can have as many items as you would like although the standard is approximately 10-20 items in a feed.

An item represents an individual blog post, article, etc in an RSS feed. One of the reasons being an RSS developer is hard is that all elements in a title are optional. These elements include author, category, comments, description, enclosure, guid, link, pubDate, source, and title, among others. The only requirement for a valid RSS feed is that an item contain either a title or description.

The title element is very straightforward as it simply provides a headline for the item. Here is an example from a recent post from Mitch Matthews.

<title>What was one of the most memorable TV show finales?</title>

(By the way the answer is Seinfeld)

Keep in mind titles and descriptions both have to adhere to standard character data.

Descriptions are also pretty easy but are often misused. Descriptions hold an item’s full content or a summary of the item’s contents. Descriptions must be properly encoded as well which is accomplished by either using HTML entitites or CDATA tags. You generally do not have to worry about this because a good publishing application will take care of character encoding for you.

Here is a properly encoded description from Mike Wagner’s blog

<description><![CDATA[You’re a hotel manager and you just read my last post, “But You Promised…!” Suddenly you get this sinking feeling, “I wonder if this was MY hotel.” In a bold move you eMail me to find out the name and location of the hotel. Seeing this as a legitimate request, I write back and disclose the [...]]]></description>

What’s in your RSS feed? (series)
The Title
The Description
The Link
Optional Channel Elements

Tags: RSS, Tutorial

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