Building your own channel is a lot like building web frames. You create the pages that you want on your channel as straight HTML, and then you create the XML framework to display those pages as a channel.

You need to decide on the following things:

• What web page or pages will be displayed in your channel
• What you will call your channel and a short description of it
• How often your channel should update

• If you want any additional pages included in your channel

Here is what I decided for my channel:

• I am using my What’s New page as the primary page of my channel
• I named my channel “The About Web Design Channel” and wrote a short description: Get Up-To-Date HTML and XML information from About
• My channel needs to update once a week, or every 7 days, more than that and there might not be any new information
• My channel will have two additional pages — my weekly advanced article and my weekly beginning article

Once you have that information, and the web pages are created, it’s easy to go about writing a channel. You can write it as straight XML using a standard text editor. Simply open a file called filename.cdf in your text editor.

First: call out the XML version information:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?>

Then start your channel:

<channel href="http://webdesign.D106/library/bl_whatsnew.htm" lastmod="2000-12-01t17:51" precache="yes" level="0">

Note: the lastmod date is in the following format: year-month-dayThour:minute

You will want to define your channel title and description next:

<title>The About Web Design Channel</title>
<abstract>Get Up-To-Date HTML and XML information from About</abstract>

The most important part of your channel is the scheduling. The most common way to schedule is with interval times. That means, every interval, the browser goes back to your channel to get the most up-to-date information. My channel is scheduled to update once a week:

<schedule startdate="2000-12-01" enddate="2001-12-01" timezone="-0800">
<intervaltime day="7"/>
</schedule>


Finally, to add additional pages to your channel, simply add the pages in as “items”:

<item href="http://webdesign.D106/library/weekly/mcurrent.htm" lastmod="2000-12-02t03:41" precache="yes" level="0">
<title>Most Recent Article</title>
<abstract>XML or Advanced HTML article updated every week to two weeks.</abstract>
</item>

Don’t forget to close your channel and upload the entire thing to your website.

</channel>

And then you’re ready to promote the web’s newest channel. Remember that channels can only be viewed with Internet Explorer.

Current XML Articles