Adding a RSS feed to a Rails app is a work of a couple of hours.
I followed the instructions detailed here.
Then I had to do some tweaking. I was missing tags in my XML, or they were not correctly populated, so I used this wikipedia page to keep the structure in mind.
The final test was the Feed Validator, which made the job really easy.
I am still having some issues, I need to try to change the address from rss.xml to feed.rss to see if the extension is the reason for Thunderbird to offer to download the file instead of parsing it.
Feed readers look at content type, not the URL. And unless you specified otherwise, Rails will apply the XML content type.
I tried initially to specify the content type as application/rss+xml as described here.
either on the response or in general.
I am running over fastcgi, so I might need to specify that in the config file. This page helped me figure that out.
I am overlapping over some family time, so it will be for later !
Thanks a lot Assaf.
I had a hard time having this work, even after you tipped me off today.
I got the feed read by Google Reader by adding this to my code:
render :action => :rss, :content_type => ‘application/rss+xml’
and that did the trick.