Mr. and Mrs. Kraus Blog

One thing that has really intrigued me lately is RSS feeds. I knew it wouldn’t be that difficult to figure them out, but I just hadn’t taken the time to research it until last week. Aaron and I set out to learn the details of this increasingly popular aspect of the web.

What it comes down to is that they are very basic. If you have a website with multiple articles in a blog or multiple news stories, then you can easily create an RSS XML file. RSS files are made up of items. Each item must have three things: a title, a link and a description. The title is the name of the article. The link is the link to the full story located on your site. And the description is the text you want to show up from the article.

I discovered there are basically two ways to go about the description. You can be really nice and provide the entire article, even including images and links. Or you can simply provide the first few hundred characters as a sort of teaser. This way if someone who subscribes to your RSS feed is interested by the beginning of your newest article, they will click the link (Ah ha! Remember one of the three parts of an item is the link) that takes them to the full story. This is not a bad idea if you are trying to bring more traffic to your site. And who isn’t?

So while I feel privileged when the feeds I subscribe to provide the entire article, thus allowing me the ability to never leave Google Reader, I completely understand when a majority of them only provide a teaser.

If you are interested in learning more about the structure of an RSS file, just look at mine! It is located at http://www.mrandmrskraus.com/rss.xml

One thing worth noting. Not only does each item have a title, link and description, but these are also provided at the top of the RSS file in order to specify the main title, main website URL, and main description of your website.

Well, I will be excited if you all subscribe to my RSS feed now. The link to it is signified by the little orange icon on my main page. Happy reading!

Chad Kraus Aaron, web development

I have been having a good time writing this website. I wrote the entire blogging system and I’m kind of proud of it. I am learning as I go because new issues keep coming up. This week the big issue was spammers posting comments to my articles.

My readers don’t want links to pictures of Paris Hilton or ads for Viagra. And I don’t want to have to monitor all the comments on my site, and delete spam comments everyday. So I have found a wonderful and simple solution that I thought I would share.

I went to this website. They have provided a free PHP script to include Captcha security images to web forms. These are those funky images where you have to type the letters or numbers you see into a field, to prove that you are a living, breathing, thinking human being, rather than a slimy, no good spam bot.

So if you are a web developer looking to add some security to a form, take a look at this script. I had it working with this site in less than 10 minutes, so major props to these guys for providing such a great script!

Written by Aaron
Posted: Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 3:35 PM

So, you think you are smarter than my spambots, do you? I’ll show you… Doh, stupid image code thingies.

Chad Kraus web development