James Cassell's Blog

Friday, February 02, 2007

RSS Feed for NHS Site

After completing most of the work on the contact form for the NHS site, I decided to start work on something else I'd had in mind. I decided to learn RSS. Initially, I read that there was no "standard" for RSS. This put me off and I kind of trashed the idea. The other day, I came across the RSS 2.0 Specification. Since the contact form is functional, and I couldn't finish it until I had the approval of the NHS sponsors, I decided to start working on an RSS feed for the site.

RSS is relatively simple to learn and use. I can personally make the content already on the site available on the RSS feed with relative ease. I am concerned, however, that whoever will maintain the site after I am gone will have some trouble. I need to design some sort of implementation where the information can be added to the site in one place, and will appear in both the feed and in the proper place on the site. I will probably do something similar to what I did with the navigation and contact pages: write a function that takes several parameters, and puts that information where it needs to go. In doing this, the RSS feed will no longer be a static file, but will rather be a dynamically created file like the other pages on the site. Implementing this will involve some mod_rewrite directives in my .htaccess file.

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