RSS Feeds in the Real Estate World

Well, I've worked quite a bit more on both producing and receiving RSS Feeds as they relate to Real Estate, and I'll share a little of what I've learned. For those that may not know much about it, RSS is an XML based standard that allows websites to share content dynamically. Its a set of data format rules that allows websites to retrieve data from each other, and save it or redisplay it - typically in html. It can be a win-win situation for both senders and receivers because it allows poeple to offer their content to be posted elsewhere on the Internet along with links back to their site, and it provides content for people who would like additional content for their site.

First - and I hope you advanced rss guys don't laugh at me - when your trying to produce an rss feed and you look at an example in your browser, don't include the dash marks you see (IE. - ) in your actual output. Thats just your browsers way of displaying it. Also if your trying to write your own rss writer, and are using a reader program to test it, be sure that you force an execution of the writer code file by using the completely qualified domain name, even though the file is on your local machine. This will cause your browser to "serve" your file and force execution of your rss writer.

Assuming your rss writer program can receive a parm called contentkey to determine the content to output in rss formet, put the following entry in your .htaccess file (if your running apache* - as I discussed in a previous article)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^someoutput.rss$ rss_writer.php?contentkey=outputindicatorstring

Next, you can type the following in your browser address bar:

http://www.domain.com/rss_reader.php?source=http://www.domain.com/someoutput.rss

as long as your rss reader program is set up to take a parm called source to identify the rss to be parsed.

Notice that I used the fully qualified domain name for the file someoutput.rss

Thats enough for now. I'll try to come up with a list of Real Estate related RSS Feeds later. I will say that you can go to Yahoo News, and type in the real estate trems your interested in, and then select RSS to tget the address of RSS formated Real Estate News.

*fyi I mis-stated previously and indicated that .htaccess and re-directs were a php feature, which isn't correct. It's actually a feature of apache web server

One other thing to keep in mind when setting up an RSS feed is the amounts of hits you might incur by over zealous rss sites that are looking for news updates every few minutes or so. Be sure to look into the and tags.