What is a feed URL?

This screen is part of a Web Feed Reference section for the Web Feed Generator. Please ask us if you cannot find the answer to your question.

A feed URL is the Web address of your news feed, Javascript include or RDF metadata. The feed URL is made of three parts:

1. The Base URL for the service is the part that points to the Metacentric Web site.
2. Your unique Site ID identifies your own Web site.
3. The relative Page URL specifies the source of your feed.

Base URL

There is a different base URL for each service we provide. The services are all based on the Metacentric Web site, so they all start with www.metacentric.net. The part after the dot net decides which service applies. Your site details are added after the question mark at the end.

http://www.metacentric.net/RSS?

Use this base URL for our News Feed service.

http://www.metacentric.net/JS?

Use this base URL for our Simple Syndication service.

http://www.metacentric.net/RDF?

Use this base URL for our RDF Metadata service.

Site ID

When you join our service, we will issue a unique identification number for each Web site you activate. The Web Feed Generator uses your site ID to match the base address of your Web site so we can fetch the right Web page. For example, siteID=1234 will be converted to http://www.yoursite.example.

Page URL

The relative URL of your Web page will be added to your site address to make the full address of the page that will be the source of your news feed. The URL part must start with a forward slash, e.g. &url=/events/WhatsNew.htm.

The first slash marks where the Base URL ends and the page URL completes the address. This example would make the feed URL:

http://www.metacentric.net/RSS?siteID=1234&url=/events/WhatsNew.htm
      

This feed URL would deliver a news feed for the Web page at:

http://www.yoursite.example/events/WhatsNew.htm
      

When you publish a feed URL on your Web page it is important to use the HTML entity & for the & in the address. Web browsers will convert this entity to a real ampersand symbol.

See also:

• Is the feed URL case sensitive?
• What is a Javascript include?
• What is metadata?