I have set up a website to keep friends and family up to date with our adventures Down Under. If I update the site I send them an email with the url. I'd like to add RSS but am not sure how to. I'm using MS Expression Web and the help is completely unhelpful.

Any starters for 10? Recommendations to use a proper web development tool will be ignored as I'm using Expression Web!

I have to say I have no idea

Why not just write a page that sends an email out to them - thats what I did

I would imagine your host would need to support it first and I would also presume you need some sort of RSS server type thingy - stop me if Im getting too technical!

A quick google search found this which might suit your needs. If your host supports asp I could probably knock you up a page that would autogenerate emails too.

My experience with RSS is limited to turning a feed into a webpart for use on WSS.

Am I missing something here?

Why don't you set up a blog e.g. from Blogger. It's free, anyone can subscribe to the blog by email to be notified when it's updated or subscribe to an RSS feed. With Blogger you can even send text and photos to your blog from a mobile phone, update your blog from anywhere you can access a PC, etc.

Missing something? Not at all, I was completely unaware of Blogger looks nice and simple to set up.

An RSS feed is nothing more than a normal XML file. It has to follow ISO standards, but they are very easy to set up. Looking something like..



You could copy and paste that text above, save it to a text file, rename it to have an .rss extension, upload it to your site then point an RSS reader at it and it will work. To add more entries just keep repeating the <item> ... </item> blocks.

Now you have an RSS feed you need to work out whether you are wanting to update the file manually or automatically. If it's the latter then I would need to know more about the hosting package you have, the server OS type, what server side languages are available to you and if you use a database to hold the story details.

Interesting ... I can feel a little rss dabbeling coming on

Me too, although I went with your suggestion, I'll look into this as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)#RSS_2.0

That's a more complete example of an RSS (v2) feed, my example above was simplified. I can't imagine there isn't a simple app that creates the files for you from either a database or a GUI front end.

If anyone is interested in actually coding one, then remember to cache the generated file, so the db isn't hit every time the RSS feed is requested. I doubt anyone here would be bothered to do so, but if you do, give me a shout if you get stuck.

Web parts are the spawn of the devil. Ridiculously stupid Microsoft framework. I had to build them for MOSS components and, as usual, MS has you jumping through hoops just to get it working the way they want you to code them.

I'm in full agreement, I hate them! WSS is poorly designed anyway. I've never known something to work fine for literally months on end and then one day just stop working for no good reason what so ever. WSS decided to stop it's SQL service and wouldn't restart it at all. A reboot of the server solves this but that's just bad design!

Web Parts are indeed a pain in the ringpiece. Fortunately my dealings with them are over for the moment!

Been playing about with RSS as well of late, and was able to successfully get a feed up and running last night, before trying to be smart and killing it Fixed again and up and running now

I just got it to work in about 2 mins

Now just need to work out how to update the file on the fly

RSS is the future.

Easy..

Probably