Create an RSS Feed for Your Website
Online Marketing Jan 24, 2007
Create an RSS Feed for Your Website
Create an RSS Feed for Your Website – Syndicating your website content is a great way to provide information to your readers with minimal effort. Using RSS, your updated content is automatically delivered to individuals who have subscribed to your feed. In this article, I’ll briefly explain RSS and show you how to syndicate your website content – even if you know very little about RSS feeds.
RSS Defined
According to Wikipedia, RSS is a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites.
Using RSS, web admins can format their content in a standardized way, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software or automatically updated on the website as new content appears.
Syndicating your website content is a great way to provide information to your readers with minimal effort. Using RSS, your updated content is automatically delivered to individuals who have subscribed to your feed.
Feeds are typically identified by the word “Subscribe,” an orange rectangle, or by the letters “RSS” or “XML”. Many news aggregators publish subscription buttons for use on Web pages to simplify the process of adding news feeds.
Choosing the Content to Syndicate
Okay, so you’re interested in syndication, but you’re not exactly sure what to syndicate. There’s really no hard-and-fast rule here. However, keep in mind that anything you plan to syndicate via RSS should be unique, valuable to a specific audience, and regularly updated.
So, how do you create an RSS Feed?
All RSS feeds are written using a code type called XML. If you’re not familiar with XML, don’t let that deter you. I’ll provide the specific code you need and instructions on how to use it.
To begin, you’ll need to create an RSS file that contains a Title, Description, and Link URL.
This information will be used by the RSS reader when individuals subscribe to your RSS feed. Follow these simple steps.
1. Go to your “Start Menu” in the lower left-hand corner of your computer screen.
Clíck on “All Programs” and navigate to Accessories. There you’ll find an option called “Notepad”. Notepad is a simple text editor that you will use to develop your RSS scrípt.
2. Write the RSS script that contains information about your website or content page and information about the content you’re syndicating.
Be sure to use the Title of your website and article, as well as links, and descriptions. When you’re done, save your file by selecting “File”> “Save as” from the top bar in the Notepad window. Warning: Name your file with a .xml extension, but save it as text. (example: http://www.domain.com/rssfeed.xml).
Be sure not to use any ampersands or quotes in your code, as they may cause errors. XML requires ampersands to be replaced in the code with “&” and quotes with “& amp;quot;, whatever is included in your quotes.
The best advice I can give is to avoid including quotes or ampersands, as this will help prevent coding issues.
3. Save, upload, and validate your .xml code. After saving your RSS file via Notepad, the next step is to upload your .xml file to your web server.
This file should be placed in the same directory as your homepage or the directory of the page you’ve selected to syndicate.
Now that we’ve created and uploaded your RSS feed, we must validate it. By doing so, we know that the feed is active and will work when individuals subscribe.
To validate your feed, visit http://validator.w3.org/feed/ and enter your feed URL.
The URL of your feed is simply the URL of the .xml file you just uploaded to your server.
So, if your file was saved to your website’s leading directory and is called “RSS feed,” enter your website’s URL, followed by “/rssfeeds.xml.” Once validated, your RSS feed is ready to be syndicated.
4. Place your RSS code on your website. The best way to do this is to copy the RSS button and include a link to the RSS feed you just created.
You can grab the RSS or XML image by simply visiting a website like MarketingScoop.com and right-clicking the picture. Save the image (give it a name like RSS.gif) and copy it onto your server. Be sure to replace the information above with your own feed link and image link.
5. Subscribe to your feed.
After you’ve uploaded all of your pages to your live site or testing server, open a browser and clíck on your own RSS button. You should be taken to a dialogue box that asks if you’d like to subscribe to your feed. Subscribe and confirm that the feed has been added to your list of RSS feeds. It should appear in a dialog box on the left-hand side of the page.
Note: If you’re using Firefox, you will only receive a text page when clicking on your RSS button. Those using the Firefox browser can clíck on a small icon that resides on their browser
nav toolbar to add your feed. Additionally, the text file contains your feed URL, which you can also use.
6. Ping aggregators to let them know that you’ve created an RSS feed.
To let the World Wide Web know that your feed is up and running, you must give it a Ping. This is very easy to do – go to pingomatic.com and select the sites you want to notify. Select blog-related sites if you’re a blog and non-blog-related sites for other content. Content the information and Ping.
A final note. Whenever you want to syndicate new content, Contentl needs to update your .xml file with a link to the content and a revised description. Once you’ve done so, upload the file to your server, replacing the existing .xml file. The code will then take care of the rest.
Post excerpts from About The Author, Michael Fleischner
# Create an RSS Feed for Your Website