Creating an RSS Feed with IceRocket

First you want to go to this URL http://rss.icerocket.com/. Once you're there create a free account. It only takes about 5 minutes and then you're on your way.

Start with their 3 step process. First, create a channel. This is basically the details on your RSS feed. The channel link is basically where you want someone to go when they click on your feed link. I just choose the main URL like http://www.thomallen.com/blog.

Next, you will want to add content. What I did was take the first paragraph of a press release and put that in the Entry Summary field. in the Entry Link I added the URL to the actual press release. This way when the reader clicks on the entry link they will be taken to the main thomallen.com site.

The last step is to publish your RSS feed. You can do a couple of things here. The first is to host the actual XML on your server. This requires you to upload the file via FTP. What I would recommend at first is to let IceRocket host the feed. They give you a URL that basically generates the RSS (XML) on the fly. In the future when your feed gets larger or you want to customize it more, you should think about hosting it on your own server.

IceRocket provides an XML button to add to your site which allows someone to add the RSS feed to their reader. That's about all there is to it. Then, every time you add new content, you just log into IceRocket, add the Entry Summary and the URL to the full page and then save. The next time someone refreshes their reader your new post will be available.

The whole process took me about 15 minutes from start to finish. If you are in the market to create an RSS feed from content that isn't related to a blog, this is a great solution.