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PC Knowledge Base - Channel

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What is a Channel? It's best thought of as how you choose to define the information you are going to put into the file. For instance if you are putting out an RSS file to get people to look at your Web Site which has information about and sells Perfume, your channel would be that. Thus the title would read: As you can see from the template above the channel is defined by the following parameters.

<image>

</image>

Remember if you look at the bottom of the file you will find the end Channel marker which is of course

</channel>.

Now the next level as we drill down is the item (items within the channel).

<item>

<dc:creator></dc:creator>

</item>

Again each item will have a title. The item title here may be: As you can see the file follows a logical template drilling down from:

XML lines - "Hello World I am an XML file"
Channel - "Hello World. This is my Channel and the overall topic we will be discussing in the Channel." (and all the info you want to give on it.)
Item - "Hello World. I am an item in the above channel. Here is my information, my pictures, my source and where you can find me."

And remember at the end you will need the closing for both Channel and RSS:

</channel>
</rss>

If you are an author or writer think of it like this:

XML Lines describe the genre - Say "Hello World This is a book on fantasy"
Channel Line describes the book - Say "Hello World this is a book whose title is "Randy Pandy's Perfumery"
Item Lines describe each chapter. "Hello World this is a chapter "Seduction - The Perfect Unisex Scent"

The following deals with Channel Main Elements. There are also Channel sub-elements more specifically the "image" element. Crtitical Point - None of these are required EXCEPT for the

<CHANNEL></CHANNEL>

command line. However it is a good idea to include some of them.

Look on a Channel as how you choose to define the information you are going to put into the RSS file (remember it is rss.xml" for our series.) For instance if you are putting out an RSS file to get people to look at your Web Site which has information about and sells Perfume, your channel would be:

<TITLE>Randy Pandy's Perfumery</TITLE>

and read in the RSS File as:

<channel>
<TITLE>Randy Pandy's Perfumery</TITLE>

Next comes the Description of your Channel. So how to define your Channel? "RSS Feed for The Great Perfume Products Sold At Randy's Pandy's Perfumery" would look like:

<DESCRIPTION>RSS Feed for The Great Perfume Products Sold At Randy's Pandy's Perfumery
</DESCRIPTION>

Now Copyright, after all we are going to release everything we write out into the Internet Virtual world and we would like to mark the text with just some sort of ownership statement. That is your copyright.

<copyright>Copyright 2006 Randy Pandy's Perfumery - All Rights Reserved</copyright>

Next command - The "link" command> You do want to be able to give any viewers the ability to know just where to find these great deals on perfume. So the link command tells them where you are and how to get to you. Let us say the website is at the directory:

http://www.randypandy.com

So the link command will look like:

<link>http://www.randypandy.com</link>

Next is Language. A language command is needed because it is part of the RSS specifications and it is important for the Readers to know just what langauge you are using. It also helps search engines know what language this is. And anything you can do to be helpful to Search Engines is critical. Care needs to be taken. Most will write in English. But what happens if the RSS feed is in another language? Well the code works like this.

language-code = primary-code ( "-" subcode )

So if you were writing in English from the United States your code would be: en-us. The subcode isn't needed, "en" would be enough. A langauge code table can be found at http://www.purplepages.ie/RSS/netscape/languages.html So the next line will read:

<language>en-us</language>

(Remember the "-us" is purely optional.)

Now we come to the "last build date". Again the reason for this is simple. To let search engines and users know when was the last time the file was updated. However, here too, there are some caveats. You must follow specifications on Dates. Each Day & Month is represented by a 3 letter character, as follows:

Days: Mon, Tue, Wed,Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun
Months: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec

Now as to time, we can use GMT, EST, CST, MST, PST etc. Most RSS feeds will prefer to use the GMT as it is basically universal and can be checked on the internet fairly simply. So finally our date will look like this: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 23:00:00 GMT

There are other possiblities here

pubDate this is along the same syntax as lastbuilddate and just tells people when the file.was published Usually used for newspapers and the like to flip automatically each day.
managingEditor - this is the email address for person responsible for content of the feed.
webMaster - this the email address for the person responsible for technical issues relating to channel.
category - This is used to specify one or more categories that the channel belongs to. So here we may put: "E-commerce"
generator This is A string indicating the program used to generate the channel.
skipHours A hint for aggregators telling them which hours they can skip.
skipDays A hint for aggregators telling them which days they can skip.

All together it is:

<CHANNEL>

<TITLE>Randy Pandy's Perfumery</TITLE>

<DESCRIPTION>RSS Feed for The Great Perfume Products Sold At Randy's

Pandy's Perfumery</DESCRIPTION>

<link>http://www.randypandy.com</link>

<language>en-us</language>

<managingEditor>randypandy@randypandy.com (Randy Pandy)</managingEditor>

<webMaster>webmaster@randypandy.com (Pandy Randy)</webMaster>

<category>Ecommerce</category>

<pubdate>Mon, 5 Dec 2005 23:00:00 GMT</pubdate>

<lastBuildDate>Sun, 4 Dec 2005 23:00:00 GMT</lastBuildDate>

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