Anyone who's anyone these days in the online news distribution world (nice buzzwords) has something that allows other users to grab their latest content and parse it for use on their site. These "somethings" usually come in the form of an RDF or an RSS feed which, for most people, isn't the easiest thing to generate. Sure, you can remake it by hand each time once you have the framework in place for it - but that's a pain. DevArticles just might have an answer to that problem though...

In their latest, Building a Generic RSS Class With PHP, they step you through creating that syndication file for your site using a simple PHP class to grab your content (they use a news sample, but you could do it with just about anything) and create the file so that others, with a standard RSS parser, can use it.

It's also nice that they include this page in there, explaining how RSS fits into the world of XML and a little bit of history behind it. It helps to give it a little more depth and show that there really was some thought behind the making of this format.