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Good tutorial on making an RSS Feed with ColdFusion

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Posted in ColdFusion | Posted on 10-16-2006 | 14,115 views

I was planning a simple tutorial on how to create an RSS feed. This would be a very simple and direct "Do This", and not "Here are the ten thousand versions of RSS" type of article, but Pete beat me to it. You can find this article here:

Howto Create an RSS 2.0 Feed

If you just need to get a RSS feed up quickly, this is the article for you.

By the way - time for a <cftease> - In a few days (or week or so, but close) something is going to launch. What is it? I can't say. But I can say it is the main reason my open source applications have slowed down quite a bit the last few months.

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Sam Smith said on 10-16-2006 at 1:41 PM #
You tease. I will admit though that I am waiting for it. (Whatever it is)
Leif said on 10-16-2006 at 2:06 PM #
When you say "slowed down a bit", you realize that to the rest of us that means that you are operating at a normal mortal's speed and not the Jedi Knight speed with which you normally blur past us all, right?
Raymond Camden said on 10-16-2006 at 2:14 PM #
Heh, I never said I was a good programmer. Fast, yes. ;)
Robert Owen said on 10-16-2006 at 2:44 PM #
You're such a Tease!
John Allen said on 10-16-2006 at 3:20 PM #
EXCITED!
Dan Sorensen said on 10-16-2006 at 4:09 PM #
"the main reason my open source applications have slowed down quite a bit the last few months."

I thought this had something to do with the new season of Lost. ;-)
TJ Downes said on 10-16-2006 at 7:17 PM #
I know what it is... I know what it is...
Hans said on 10-16-2006 at 7:40 PM #
I'm predicting Ray has become a Flex addict, and the slow down was due to training for jedi master level Flex skills. :-)
Raymond Camden said on 10-16-2006 at 7:57 PM #
I _do_ love Flex - but I'm a bit of a newbie still. I wish I could work on a project to get some eal world experience.
Ben Nadel said on 10-16-2006 at 10:22 PM #
Some other links that I have found very useful:

RSS Specification
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss

Adding Style Sheets to RSS
http://www.petefreitag.com/item/208.cfm
Matt Gifford said on 10-17-2006 at 5:08 AM #
I LOVE RSS! Working with it in Coldfusion is incredibly easy.

We have numerous instances of the fantastic BlogCFC running on our work Intranet, and I wanted to combine the rss feeds into one, so I created a standalone CF component RSS Aggregator.
The component filters and combines items from specified RSS feeds into one, and can display the returned feed as a table (with options) and also as a javascript RSS Ticker.
It's been in place on our internal site for a while now and everyone loves it. It's one of my development "pride and joys".

So, a big thanks to both Ray for his hard work and development dedication, and also to Pete Freitag for his tutorials. Both have been invaluable to me over the last year.
Greg Nilsen said on 10-17-2006 at 9:50 AM #
Yea, that's actually the site I used when putting my RSS feed together last winter. Simple, and very useful.

But the RSS Specification that Ben posted gives you the info on all the little ins and outs that you can add to your RSS feed.
Scott P said on 10-17-2006 at 10:01 AM #
SECRET PROJECT SPOILER

it is a Cylon detector
Marnie Pehrson said on 03-18-2008 at 2:31 PM #
Does anyone have a good coldfusion script for cleaning up all the junk characters people use that mess up an RSS feed? I have an article database that the public adds to. And the special characters like smart quotes, em dashes, and other special characters mess up the feeds. I've used Replace to strip out most of them, but it's next to impossible to catch all the odd characters that exist out there. Any ideas?
Ben Nadel said on 03-18-2008 at 2:35 PM #
I use regular expression pattern matching to grab high-ascii values:

http://www.bennadel.com/index.cfm?dax=blog:1155.vi...

Check out the comments to the post for more tips.
Lee Crockett said on 06-10-2009 at 11:45 AM #
Ray, I was looking for a CF tutorial on setting up an RSS, and I came across this. It is very complete:

http://www.devx.com/xml/Article/10790/1954
Raymond Camden said on 06-10-2009 at 11:46 AM #
Lee, note that since the time of writing this entry, CFFEED was added to ColdFusion 8.
James Beuthling said on 08-15-2009 at 8:41 AM #
Does anyone have a tutorial on aggregating/joining the rss/xml feeds. I have my way of doing it but it sucks. And i cant find anything but yahoo pipes. I want my own solution - maby a link to info? -- thanks
Raymond Camden said on 08-15-2009 at 8:45 AM #
Paragator:

http://paragator.riaforge.org/
James Beuthling said on 08-18-2009 at 4:36 PM #
thanks Raymond, but alas i am on cfml 7. I cannot create an object. You and ben grrrrr showing off all those neat cfml 8 tricks. Maby one day. Any one got a cfml 7 solution to rss aggregation.
Raymond Camden said on 08-18-2009 at 4:39 PM #
http://cfrss.riaforge.org - RIAForge is your friend. :)
Steve Cross said on 04-19-2010 at 2:25 PM #
It just so happens I've written one for Coldfusion 6. You should be able to create a RSS feed in CF7 too

http://www.codemonkeysteve.com/blog/2010/03/coldfu...
Paul said on 05-12-2010 at 11:36 AM #
Hi Ray,
The link to the RSS feed tutorial is five years old....
Raymond Camden said on 05-12-2010 at 11:38 AM #
Um.... yes? I'm not quite seeing your point. This blog entry is 4 years old itself.
aprian said on 05-20-2010 at 11:56 AM #
Hi ray, how to generate cdata item title and item description using cffeed?. Because the item title is using france language and the item description is having html tag and using france language too.
Thx and sorry for my bad english :)
Raymond Camden said on 05-20-2010 at 12:12 PM #
What happens when you use the French language in the original data?
aprian said on 05-20-2010 at 1:11 PM #
hmm it's work and look as it is without the xmlformat... :D. Is it safe not to use xmlformat for the item title and item description?
Raymond Camden said on 05-20-2010 at 5:44 PM #
Um... not quite sure what you just said. You said it worked? And then your second q - it should be always safe to use xmlFOrmat.
hinsel said on 03-03-2011 at 2:49 PM #
i am using similar code to pull in a feed from twitter. (i use it for blogs elsewhere too). My question is this, a user has entered a url in their item.description.xmltext field but it just shows as plain text when i pull it down...any way to make those links hot (clickable)?

i've bounced it around my head; it's mostly struck on open space, so i am open to suggestions...
Raymond Camden said on 03-09-2011 at 4:48 PM #
There are a few UDFs for this. Here is one: http://www.cflib.org/udf/activatelinks

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