So the closest I’ve come to the RSS world was last month when I decided to create a feed for the archives of Propel Your Venture. Perhaps you’re wondering: what’s the point in such a feed? The answer is simple: There’s been a tremendous increase – nearly ten-fold – in the number of visitors to the Venture Momentum website since the eZine was launched 18 months ago. The fresh content from the eZine has been the main contributor. I felt it was important to provide those visitors with the option to get notified about the addition of a new issue to the archives in their newsreader - hence the need to create an XML file containing the RSS feed. If you update your site regularly with new content, product or service announcements and other important news, using RSS can be an effective way to keep the segment of your audience that is RSS-literate updated on your recent happenings.

So the next step for me was to identify a tool that would help me achieve my objective – such tool needed to work outside of a blog authoring environment, since the archives are not a blog per se. I searched the Internet and came across a nice software program, ListGarden by Software Garden, to help me do just that.

What I like about ListGarden

• The user’s manual is available online. It’s called "Adding an RSS feed to a normal website" and it’s very well done. So you have a clear overview of functionality and usability before you download.
   
• The software is Open Source and available under the GNU GPL license at no charge, with a suggested donation.
   
• The website and its publisher, Dan Bricklin - author of Visicalc - inspired confidence. Other than the fact that I got a message from my computing environment warning me that the “publisher could not be verified”, a source of concern in today’s world, I had enough information to eliminate most of the risks associated with downloading a new software tool.
   
• Every step in creating the feed and the items, and publishing them, had a brief explanation below each field - very helpful to me as a novice user of the program.
   
• I created the feed in a matter of minutes. ListGarden even suggested the creation of my first RSS item announcing that the feed was started. This was a great way for me to test the results of my efforts and broadcast the feed to newsreaders. This is in fact where I discovered a problem I’ll discuss later in this article.
   
• The XML file created by ListGarden can be stored locally, and/or uploaded to a server online using an FTP utility within ListGarden. So a user can either use his/her own FTP program or web authoring tool to upload the local file, or use ListGarden to perform the FTP.
   
• ListGarden offers additional features such as an HTML version of the file, XML and HTML buttons, and useful tips.

One Hurdle

I encountered the following problem with the XML file I created with ListGarden: The local file opened fine in a browser, but when I uploaded it to the server where Venture Momentum’s website is hosted, the file would open in Netscape and Firefox but not in Internet Explorer. Following further investigation, it became clear that the problem was not caused by ListGarden, but by some missing settings on the ISP’s server hosting Venture Momentum’s website. Following an intervention by the ISP’s tech support, the problem was easily fixed.

In case you are curious about the content of this XML file, you can view the plain version here.

In Conclusion