Recovered from a dead backlink. Written three days after my Indian blogosphere ranking post, and still linked from a Feedburner redirect that itself died years ago. Restored from a 2008 Wayback Machine snapshot. This site now runs on a shared engine that generates its own feed automatically, no hand-rolling required anymore, but here's the original explainer close to verbatim.
4 Simple Steps to create ATOM feed for your web app
Posted 30 March 2007
On Monday, 16 June 2003 at 3:27pm, Sam Ruby published another post on his blog. It was no ordinary post. It was about the Anatomy of a well formed log entry. It was this post which evolved from a discussion on his post, to a wiki to create an open model for Web Feed Syndication (against RSS, which was copyrighted by Harvard University). Four years later, we now call it ATOM, and is the hottest way to churn out your feeds.
So here is my small 4 step tutorial to create your own ATOM 1.0 feed for your web application.
- Start with the Declaration
- Add the Feed Information — where xml:feed is the root element of the feed and the unique id is usually the url of your post (if you have unique urls for each of your posts)
- Add the Post Information — where id is a unique id (you can use your permalink here again), the type can be html or text and the category is optional.
- Validate your feed — go here to validate your feed
And that is it, you're done.
The feeds for this blog are available here, you can subscribe via atom or email.