Add an RSS Feed to Your Office Live Web Site

• Posted by acxede on October 29, 2007
• 4 comments

RSS is an XML-based format for publishing frequently updated content such as news or blogs. Most news portal and blogging software is capable of autocatically generating RSS feeds from the portal's or blog's content.

Office Live, however, doesn't generate RSS feeds. Come to think of it, that' not unreasonable. After all, Office Live is meant for building business identity web sites, not news portals. But even if you have a plain-vanilla business identity web site, there may be times when RSS feeds for some of the content on your site could come in handy - new product introductions, product updates, or company news, for example. You may not need to update such information with the same frequency as Reuter's news, but an update once a month wouldn't hurt. If you find yourself in such a situation, you'll be happy to know that you can generate RSS feeds and add them to your Office Live web site.

You can confront the problem in two ways: Entering feed details manually with a service such as IceRocket RSS Builder, or ceating an XML file in good old Notepad or another text editor of your choice. Creating the XML file manually can be a pain. Unlike HTML, XML is not a forgiving format. If you make a small mistake your feed won't work as exptected. IceRocket Feedbuilder, therefore, is the better option without question.

I generated a sample RSS feed for designerwebsites.org, Acxede.Net's companion site (See the RSS button in the top right-hand corner). I just added two entries to my feed. But you can add as many as you want. If you want to generate a similar feed, follow these steps:

1. Sign up for IceRocket RSS Builder.
2. Log in to your account and click on the My RSS Channels link in the top menu.
3. Click on the + Add Channel link to the right. The Channel Configuration page, shown in Figure 1, comes up.
   
   Figure 1
4. Enter the requested details. Note that in Figure 1, the e-mail address reads acxede@acxede.net (Acxede). You must type a human readable name in parentheses otherwise the XML validator throws a fit. The name can be anything, as long as it is enclosed in parentheses.
5. Click Save Configuration for Channel to save the configuration and return to My RSS Channels page, which will now look something like Figure 2.
   
   Figure 2
6. Click the Add Entry link next to the name of hte channel you just created. The Edit Entry page, shown in Figure 3, comes up.
   
   Figure 3
7. Enter the requested details. Note that in Figure 3, the e-mail address reads acxede@acxede.net (Acxede). Recall that you must type a human readable name in parentheses otherwise the XML validator throws a fit. The name can be anything, as long as it is enclosed in parentheses.
8. Click Save Item to save the configuration and return to My RSS Channels page.
9. Repeat steps 6 through 8 for every entry you want to addd to your feed.
10. When you're done, click on the Publish link next to the Add Entry link. You'll come to the Publish page shown in Figure 4.
    
    Figure 4
11. CLICK ON THE RSS BUTTON. (Don't forget, otherwise the code will show raw XML when someone clicks on the RSS link on your site).
12. Cut the code and paste it in an HTML module on your web page. See what my page looks like. Click on the RSS button to see the feed. You should see the feed shown in Figure 5.
    Figure 5

RSS builder has several options, including one to validate the feed. You can explore it further on your own.