Hello old_expat,

I would like to help you :) since feeds are my passion for the last year :) but let me first tell you that you don't have to know any thing about XML in order to publish a couple of feeds, maybe reading about RSS will be more helpful in your case.

google RSS and the first three links will be more than enough to understand the major principles of publishing an RSS feed

You have another choice, instead of going through the process of making your own feed you can use a software to create your feeds and this will ease your mission, you can also use an online feed service to host your feed.

I'm sorry I'm not aware of any book about this topic so I won't be helpful in this.

All the best,
Mamod

[edited by: bill at 1:57 am (utc) on Jan. 16, 2008]
[edit reason] see sticky mail [/edit]

I think I may have mislead everyone with my original post. I don't want to publish RSS feeds, I want to include published RSS feeds on my site .. I guess that means "parse them" into the HTML on one of my pages.

We have a tutorial in our Library [webmasterworld.com]: Short guide to include RSS on your website [webmasterworld.com]
It tells you how to use Magpie to include feeds in your site.

I really don't want to use Smarty templates.

Magpie is one of the most popular ways of getting feeds on your site. Otherwise you need to look at using JavaScript, iFrames, or some other PHP script that will pull the feeds for you. Often the feed providers will offer a means by which you can put the feeds on your site.

You need some sort of dynamic way to pull the feeds into your pages. What method interests you?

Since I know so little about how to pull feeds into my site, I don't really know what I might be interested in. I don't mean to be flippant when saying, "the easier the better".

The reason I don't like Smarty is because I tried to use it once on a site a coder built for me but I just couldn't understand it.

My pages are *.php and I'm on a Linux server.

There are hosted services that you can use to display feeds if you don't want or are unable to do any server side work yourself.

I can do server side work and I'm *okay* with simple PHP. I just don't want to use any frameworks. I'm not a developer .. the sites are my own .. and I don't really want to spend my time trying to learn a framework.

Are there issues with the numerous copy-and-paste JavaScript solutions out there? Those seem to be the most prevalent. You put the URL of the feed into a form and they spit out a JavaScript for you you put into your page source.

On this particular site, I already have some features that require javascript .. so javascript is doable for me .. and it sounds pretty simple.

Will the sites or directories offering the feeds have this javascript generator?

Will the sites or directories offering the feeds have this javascript generator?

Some sites will, but not all webmasters are that proactive. A search for RSS to HTML [google.com] brings up several sites that appear to work with just about any feed.

Me as well, need to learn these things good.