Just finished a project today on a website that was updating the XML file for their RSS feeds manually each time after new news articles were added. Thanks to some help from a great programmer I discovered FeedCreator.class.php which helped me to create an auto updating RSS feed for this chiropractic news website.

FeedCreator.class.php is licensed under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and it can be downloaded from this location: http://www.bitfolge.de/download/feedcreator_172

Among some of its great features, it creates valid feeds according to RSS 0.91, 1.0 or 2.0 as well as PIE 0.1 (deprecated), OPML 1.0, Unix mbox, ATOM 0.3, or customizable HTML or Javascript format. It offers configurable feed caching and it is easy to use.

A PHP script is checking hourly to make sure the contents of the XML file are up to date. You can view an example of the XML RSS feed output for the above-mentioned chiropractic sites news here: http://www.planetc1.com/rss/chiropractic_news.xml

What’s very cool about this script is that it’s creating an up to date RSS feed from a flat file database that’s getting written to by an old CGI news script. I have a feeling with this tool I’ll be able to turn some other flat file databases (such as one I know of in a classified ad script) into up-to-date RSS feeds.

I’ll post that information after I get the project completed and maybe I’ll show a step-by-step on converting some older formatted stuff to be read by RSS readers.