As a courtesy for those on the Yahoo "Archos Multimedia" list service, I created a live RSS feed that keeps track of updates for Archos AV500, AV700, AV400, and AV300 units.  (Go to the Archos Update RSS Feed)

As this is my Development Log, it would behoove me to discuss how this was accomplished, though not in technical detail.  As for technical detail, I will mention this: I am using ASP .Net with C# and a private build of my PhoenixPo.com Common Class Toolkit (for screen scraping and RSS feed creation).

Each Archos product has an "OS History" text file, accessible from the Archos support web site.  The file lists the firmware versions and what bug fixes and features have been added to the firmware at that version.  The formatting is pretty consistent, as are the firmware URLs, which lends itself to good 'ol fashioned screen scraping.

So, when someone goes to my Archos Update RSS Feed, the application first gets that file from Archos.  After that, it parses it to find all the version numbers and bug fixes.  It's not difficult, as all version numbers are preceded by a hard line return and the word "Version" or "V", depending upon the product.  Once the application reads that stuff into appropriate classes, it reverses the order (new firmware versions are always last on the Archos site).  Viola; I have everything I need in a format I can use.

In all honesty, creating the actual RSS feed took the longest and was a pain.  I first had to learn how to construct an RSS 2.0 feed.  I used the feed from The Daily WTF, I forum I quite enjoy, as a template for constructing the feed.  But no matter what I did, I could not get the hard returns to show up in the feed when fed through Sage, my Firefox news aggregator. 

I finally found the line return solution in the Hack a Day RSS feed.  If I encapsulate the news item's description field with "<![CDATA[" and "]]>", which I forgot from my XML training three years prior, I can use whatever HTML I want.  After that, it was simply a matter of substituting "<br/>" for any line returns.

The actual page that spouts the RSS feed based on a query string was easy to construct, as I set the MIME type to "XML" and called the "FirmwareList" object's "ToRSS().ToString()" method.  The first method creates, populates, and returns my Common Class Toolkit's "PhoenixPo.Web.RSS" object, and the last method converts it to the XML form I need for the RSS.

Now you know how the Archos Update RSS Feed works.  For those of you who asked, I hope the information was useful.