Every day more and more Web sites are making their content available using "web feeds". Feeds provide an easy method for creators to syndicate content and for consumers to keep up-to-date with their favourite sites without having to go to individual sites. Web feeds normally contains a short summary of content from a Web site and a link to the full article or more information. Web feeds can either be of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or ATOM formats. Both formats are expressed in XML.

There are several choices to create an RSS news channel that lists  various articles/news on your site or in your e-mail newsletter, namely:

• Construct it from scratch in Notepad (easy in some cases but not efficient in the long run e.g. when the people working on it are not able to edit XML)
• Prepare the feed from a stand-alone tool such as RSS Channel Editor.  (example)
• Have a software tool "scrape" the site and incorporate the most important information it finds there 
• Exploit your Content Management System. Many CMSs have inbuilt mechanisms to  aggregate feeds: CMSs usually have functionality to export content to RSS or your webmaster can easily write a function to read all contents and create an RSS output

Of course, software tools may not be customizable enough to obtain quality metadata: identifying the subject for single items or using additional namespaces may be difficult if not impossible. In order to create the feed manually, or to write a procedure that creates it from your database or CMS, you need to be familiar with XML 1.0 and use the metadata set of one of the most widely used standards for syndication:

• RSS 1.0  
• RSS 2.0
• Atom

AgriFeeds accepts feeds in both the RSS (1.0 and 2.0) and the Atom format. Please be aware that in AgriFeeds the following RSS elements are mandatory: title, description, link and pubDate. 

All the above formats can be extended using additional namespaces for including more specific and informative metadata: AgriFeeds encourages to submit all feeds using the Dublin Core namespace, and, for feeds of events the Event AP. Once you have your feed ready, you need to publish it on a web server, so that it is reachable through a URL. Then you are ready to submit your feed URL to as many news readers and news aggregators as you like.