RSS Feeds

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way to distribute web content such as blogs, videos, news and podcasts. Once a visitor sets up an RSS feed to your website, whenever you make any changes to your website, those changes are automatically sent to their reader without them ever having to visit your site again. Of course, luring them back is exactly what you intend to do.

Publishing RSS Feeds

There are four steps to publishing your content through an RSS Feed.

1. You create new content. This can be anything that you put up on your website that you decide is suitable to be published.
2. You update your RSS feed. The feed is a specially formatted file that contains the Title, a short Description (or the full content), and a Link to the Web page where the content is located.
3. A visitor subscribes to your RSS feed. This is generally through a button that you set up on your home page to make this task easy.
4. Your visitor receives updates in their RSS reader whenever new content is published. The most important part of this is that your feed contains a link back to a specific page on your website. You know the visitor is interested in your site content so your RSS Feed should be an active marketing message that brings them back to sell them your product or service.

A list of online web services to create an RSS feed of a website.

Some are very simple while others are more advanced, so depending on your level of expertise, you are sure to find a tool that can help you get the custom RSS feed you are seeking.

1. Feed43 - Feed43 is the most complex for people with experience of coding websites. YOu have the most control over the final appearance of the feed. Take a look at the tutorial to understand how the syntax works to create variables.


2. Feedity - This service is simple, but adds a small level of refining to the automatically generated feeds. After users provide the URL of the page to make a feed of, Feedity gives the option of inputting a Start and End block (HTML tags), to notify the service where each post starts and ends.

3. Feedmarklet - This tool is probably the simplest and the easiest to use, but it requires manual updating of the feed that you generate. Feedmarklet gives you your own RSS feed instantly, with no sign up required. Using a bookmarklet button in the browser bookmark bar, users can easily add any page to the feed quickly. Not too many features are present here.

4. Dapper - Dapper allows anyone to create Dapps (widgets) that track the content of any website. This can also be used to track the RSS feeds of sites that do not offer one. In terms of features, Dapper has the most diverse selection, but it does require a learning curve. Be sure to check out DapperFox which is a Firefox extension that creates an RSS feed from any page.

5. FeedYes - Yet another of the easy feed creation tools, this one requires nothing more than the URL of the page you wish to transform and a tag. Once the service discovers items for the feed, it is up to you to weed out the unnecessary ones, by setting the minimum and maximum number of characters in a title and by selecting the first and last news items of value. Great for beginners!

6. Ponyfish - I found Ponyfish to be perhaps the easiest to use. After users provide the URL, the service provides a small window of that address, where users must simply click on each link that is to be added to the feed. After this Ponyfish tries to determine a generic URL with your help (using “*” as wildcard symbols), in order to retrieve future items to be added to the feed automatically.

7. Page2RSS - Described as “a service that helps you monitor web sites that do not publish RSS feeds. It will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS aggregator.” This site offers a bookmark toolbar button that provides a quick way to generate a feed while visiting any website.

RSS Readers

The best way to understand RSS Feeds is to sign up for some.

Windows Users

There is a comprehensive list of RSS readers at 2rss.com

There are two popular and free RSS Readers

BlogExpress available from usablelabs.com
RSSReader available from rssreader.com

Mac Users

NetNewsWire is free and available from newsgator.com

Online Services

You can also read your feeds through My Yahoo!, Google Reader or iGoogle...

• yahoo.com
• google.com
• igoogle

Creating Your Own RSS Feed

Create Your Feed

Create the following document, fill in the content and the names of your images that you use and call it something like http://www.yourwebsite.com/feedname.xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>

<rss version="0.91">

<channel>

<title> Your Feed Title </title>
<link> The URL of your feed link </link>
<description> The description of your Feed </description>
<language>en-us</language>

<image>
<title> Image Description </title>
<url> RSS image URL</url>
<link> URL link </link>
<width>90</width>
<height>36</height>
</image>

<item>
<title>Title of the first feed</title>
<link> URL of your website </link>
<description> All the content of your first feed </description>
</item>

<item>
<title>Title of the second </title>
<link> URL of your website </link>
<description> All the content of your second feed </description>
</item>

</channel>

</rss>

Validate your feed