Using RSS for the articles on my site

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xvszero

Hey!

I'm setting up some RSS so people can subscribe to articles on my site. I understand the syntax (easy enough) and I got a test RSS file up that works. What I don't get is:

A. How many articles do I keep in my RSS feed? Infinite?! Or do I set some limit, like... only keep the newest 100 articles at any given time or something?

A. With that in mind, how do I update my RSS feed, do I have my code recreate the file every time a new article is added!? That seems like a kind of messy (though possible) way to do it. Or am I supposed to be querying the database and creating the feed on the fly? But can XML even do that?

So yeah, like I said, I understand the format and I have that working, I'm just curious about the standards and how people keep their file updated.

ZABI

best idea i think is to generate your feeds on the fly. You can use PHP to do the job very easily.

having an option for users to select categories of their interest to get feeds is also a good idea. for example someone may be interested in Gamming but not in forex etc... so he/she can easily find what they like. its a suggestion thogh

xvszero

Ok I got it set up pretty nicely "on the fly" with PHP, users can either click a button to get everything or select what they want in their feed piece by piece.

I have a question more related to the theory of RSS though. Basically, my site is a multimedia site of sorts... a lot of my articles are text-based, but I also have a podcast and webcomics that will be in the feed. I guess my question is, when you have media like this, does it make sense to put it in the description area of the feed, or just have a description and users have to click the link to get to the actual media? I have never used RSS myself so I don't have the best sense of how it is used. I sort of suspect that some people don't want big images eating up their feeds.

I thought about maybe showing thumbnails of the comics or something but even that can get out of hand as a lot of the comics on my site are very "tall". Here is an example.

So yeah, just curious what you guys think about that.

Also still wondering how long I should make my feed. Right now I have it set to the 100 newest, but I wonder if it should be bigger? Although really 100 things on my site is a good couple of months, not sure anyone would need to have much further back than that in their feed.

Here is my current feed select page if anyone is interested. Albeit the final live one may or may not be at that address.