I'm not super familiar with RSS feeds but I have an idea of what they are. To me you're asking two totally different questions.
- How do you test RSS feeds? Get an RSS reader would be my suggestion. If the feed can be parsed successfully it is working, IMO.
Windows RSS feed readers
- Can you create your own? Sure. Look up the spec (on Wikipedia or something; it's just XML) and you could manually write out a simple one using Notepad or text editor.
And I just realized. There's a
W3C Feed Validation Service too, just like how you can validate if HTML is proper and so on. Looks like you can either enter a URL of the feed or paste in the raw XML text for the feed. A search of "rss validator" should bring up some more info.