It’s very easy to generate RSS feeds in Rails. In fact, if there is any possible benefit to having RSS feeds in your rails application, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t take a few minutes and set them up.

These days, you just have to create a file like :action.rss.builder to go along with your :action.html.erb file. You don’t even need a respond_to block in your action. As long as you have a route setup that knows how to handle additional formats, rails will automatically render your .rss.builder file rather than your .html.erb file if an .rss extension is at the end of the url.

For the basics of generating RSS feeds in rails, check out this screencast.

If you’d like to include media in your RSS feeds you should use the Yahoo media namespace xml definitions. To include this namespace in your feed you can use:

You can then generate a namespaced XML element like this: