You, Netsuite and RSS

It's a brave new "syndicated" world out there - and the latest release of 2009.1 from Netsuite has made the managing of an RSS feed a little more - well - manageable.  Although it's not quite as simple as checking a box that says "include in RSS feed" or even bracketing your content with as specific tag and having the RSS engine pick it up and publish it to the feed (Netsuite are you reading this?) - it is "mostly" painless.

Basically, tucked away under Lists > Web Sites > RSS Feeds is the interface.  And it's about as simple as you can make it for a fully manual process.  The fields are:

• Title - this is how YOU will see the feed inside Netsuite and how the RSS feed will identify itself
  
• Alias - this is the variable that gets passed to Netsuite on the GET to say "this feed" as opposed to "the other feed"...  just don't put naughty words here
• Description - self explanatory - this does not seem to appear in the external feed - which is nice
• Available Externally - means what the 2 words say it means
  

For the items you are adding to the feed - each gets a Title, Description and URL for the content.  There's not the ability to include images / podcasts /etc in the feed at this point (without hoop jumping).  Netsuite handles the time stamping of the feed entries - so no feed stuffing is going on in this implementation...  and that's it - once you have generated the feed parameters - you are just about done.

All that's left now is to take the feed you just generated and submit it to whatever consuming service you choose.

One last thing - if you are generating a feed that contains content you would like to offer as an onpage subscription within your own site (as opposed to / or in addition to an external feed) - all you need to do is include this tag in the HEAD section of the page where you would like people to be able to subscribe from:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="FEED TITLE HERE" href="GENERATED NETSUITE URL HERE">
Most browsers now will allow the "subscription" to that feed on that page.  And that's it - you now have syndicated content...  talk about the Netsweetness of that!