Sueetie Aggregate Blog Post List Now Supports RSS

I mentioned in yesterday’s announcement of Aggregate Blog Posts that Syndication was still missing. Well it isn’t any longer. The Sueetie Aggregate Blog Recent Post List now has both RSS and ATOM feed support.  In other words, recent posts from all Sueetie.com blogs are now available in a single feed. The blog names prefix the post title so you’ll know which blog posts you’re reading.  Here’s a snapshot of what the feed looks like in my feed reader.

Click on the black button to get started. The Syndication button serves up RSS, but Atom is also supported and available from the RSS Icon in the browser address bar.

While I was adding RSS icons I enabled RSS on the Sueetie Home Page Recent Blog Post List.

Something else that’s very cool is the RSS icon in the browser address bar after I added the appropriate header tags to the new  link feeds.

Now to the technical segment of our show. It was important to choose the best model for generating the first Sueetie RSS feed, because I plan on serving up a lot of Sueetie feeds based on its core logic. I reviewed the BlogEngine.NET feed source before deciding and found it to be pretty dated.  Then again, when it comes to RSS feeds, if it ain't broke don't fix it. I knew I wanted to start fresh and use the newer Microsoft .NET Syndication classes.

Microsoft has a SyndicationFeed class that drastically reduces the amount of code necessary to create RSS feeds. It's really excellent. Here's the MSDN Syndication Feed Class page with good sample code to get you started.

Scott Mitchell wrote a super article on using the SyndicationFeed Class that I based much of the Sueetie feed generation logic on.  Thanks, Scott!

I also want to mention Kevin Miller who wrote a blog post on creating RSS Feeds in ASP.NET that was very helpful.