An RSS feed is a web feed that contains a summary of updates from a website and offers an easy way of staying up to date on new content from a website.
For our recent client project we wanted a way of staying up to date with new external blogs being posted from people at TIL, this is where the RSS feed became very useful.
To access the RSS feed XML code, view the page source for your desired site (as shown in the image above), search RSS and you will get the XML code for the RSS feed, which in this case, gives the information for the 10 most recent blogs posted on this particular blog site.
The image below shows the RSS feed XML code for this particular blog site.
This code can then be parsed out using Alteryx to give the desired information for each blog that has been posted, such as the title and published date. The image below shows the dataset after the XML code has been parsed out using the XML parse tool, along with a few steps to clean up the data. This Alteryx flow is also dynamic so that new blogs posted will be added to the dataset when the flow is run.
Once we get this information we can put it into Tableau to make a dashboard showing all the recent blog posts.