You probably already know what RSS is - it is a file format for syndicating news and the content of sites, in a very flexible manner. What you probably don`t know is that creating a correct RSS feed is in many cases a very difficult task for webmasters. I am not talking about sites that supply just a few news a day, I am talking about sites that supply tens of news a day.

Let`s take for example a shareware site. For the site to become popular, it has to be always up to date and to contain all the latest releases. So, the webmasters have to search for the new titles and add them to their databases. Many of them offer their visitors the possibility to stay informed about the latest releases using RSS feeds, which contain their names, links and short descripptions of the new releases. Visitors interested in this kind of information subscribe to the RSS feeds, using web-based or desktop aggregators, like Bloglines or SharpReader. All the aggregators query the RSS feeds every couple of hours, which is sufficient for many of the feeds, but not for all of them. It is a common practice that the feeds supply only the last 20 items, but what if, between two queries from the aggregators, appear, let`s say, 43 items? Then, 23 of them wouldn`t appear to the subscribers. Probably you`ve never thought about this, but I can assure you this situation really occurs, and you have to solve it, for you and your visitors` interest.