Good tutorial on making an RSS Feed with ColdFusion

coldfusion (This post is more than 2 years old.)

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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Archived Comments

Comment 1 by Sam Smith posted on 10/16/2006 at 10:41 PM

You tease. I will admit though that I am waiting for it. (Whatever it is)

Comment 2 by Leif posted on 10/16/2006 at 11:06 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?

Comment 3 by Raymond Camden posted on 10/16/2006 at 11:14 PM

Heh, I never said I was a good programmer. Fast, yes. ;)

Comment 4 by Robert Owen posted on 10/16/2006 at 11:44 PM

You're such a Tease!

Comment 5 by John Allen posted on 10/17/2006 at 12:20 AM

EXCITED!

Comment 6 by Dan Sorensen posted on 10/17/2006 at 1:09 AM

"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. ;-)

Comment 7 by TJ Downes posted on 10/17/2006 at 4:17 AM

I know what it is... I know what it is...

Comment 8 by Hans posted on 10/17/2006 at 4:40 AM

I'm predicting Ray has become a Flex addict, and the slow down was due to training for jedi master level Flex skills. :-)

Comment 9 by Raymond Camden posted on 10/17/2006 at 4:57 AM

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.

Comment 10 by Ben Nadel posted on 10/17/2006 at 7:22 AM

Some other links that I have found very useful:

RSS Specification
http://blogs.law.harvard.ed...

Adding Style Sheets to RSS
http://www.petefreitag.com/...

Comment 11 by Matt Gifford posted on 10/17/2006 at 2:08 PM

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.

Comment 12 by Greg Nilsen posted on 10/17/2006 at 6:50 PM

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.

Comment 13 by Scott P posted on 10/17/2006 at 7:01 PM

SECRET PROJECT SPOILER

it is a Cylon detector

Comment 14 by Marnie Pehrson posted on 3/18/2008 at 11:31 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?

Comment 15 by Ben Nadel posted on 3/18/2008 at 11:35 PM

I use regular expression pattern matching to grab high-ascii values:

http://www.bennadel.com/ind...

Check out the comments to the post for more tips.

Comment 16 by Lee Crockett posted on 6/10/2009 at 8:45 PM

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/Art...

Comment 17 by Raymond Camden posted on 6/10/2009 at 8:46 PM

Lee, note that since the time of writing this entry, CFFEED was added to ColdFusion 8.

Comment 18 by James Beuthling posted on 8/15/2009 at 5:41 PM

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

Comment 19 by Raymond Camden posted on 8/15/2009 at 5:45 PM

Paragator:

http://paragator.riaforge.org/

Comment 20 by James Beuthling posted on 8/19/2009 at 1:36 AM

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.

Comment 21 by Raymond Camden posted on 8/19/2009 at 1:39 AM

http://cfrss.riaforge.org - RIAForge is your friend. :)

Comment 22 by Steve Cross posted on 4/19/2010 at 11:25 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....

Comment 23 by Paul posted on 5/12/2010 at 8:36 PM

Hi Ray,
The link to the RSS feed tutorial is five years old....

Comment 24 by Raymond Camden posted on 5/12/2010 at 8:38 PM

Um.... yes? I'm not quite seeing your point. This blog entry is 4 years old itself.

Comment 25 by aprian posted on 5/20/2010 at 8:56 PM

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 :)

Comment 26 by Raymond Camden posted on 5/20/2010 at 9:12 PM

What happens when you use the French language in the original data?

Comment 27 by aprian posted on 5/20/2010 at 10:11 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?

Comment 28 by Raymond Camden posted on 5/21/2010 at 2:44 AM

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.

Comment 29 by hinsel posted on 3/4/2011 at 1:49 AM

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...

Comment 30 by Raymond Camden posted on 3/10/2011 at 3:48 AM

There are a few UDFs for this. Here is one: http://www.cflib.org/udf/ac...