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Blogging, RSS & Feeds
How to Create an RSS Feed
An RSS news feed can be used to communicate with your target audience. It is an ideal means of notifying people of new content on your website without the need for them to keep on visiting your site. You can send newsletters to your readership without having to use email and risk being accused of spamming. You will be comfortable in the knowledge that people who request your feed are actually interested in it because they have actively subscribed to it. This article will explain just how to create your own RSS news feed.
There are a couple of ways to create an RSS file, you can use an editor designed for the purpose or you can create a file using a simple text editor. The latter will require you to learn some XML whilst the former will do the hard part for you. First off I will describe an RSS file, there are several versions and I will be showing you version 2.0, the latest RSS version.
An RSS file looks just like an HTML file except it has different tags and the files end in .rss or .xml rather than .html. The file is made up of header information and item information, the item information contains the actual news items.
The first section of the file contains the header information. This states that the file is XML and which version, the encoding used and the version of RSS that you are using. This part of the file is mandatory. Next up is the channel tag, this encloses the whole of the rest of the file. This is followed by a title, description and link which explain the what the feed is about and what website it is associated with. The final part of the header is the optional image information. If you use this the software that is used to parse or read your file can display a small picture such as a logo.
Please note that in these examples I have used square brackets instead of angled brackets.
[?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?]
[rss version="2.0"]
[channel]
[title]The Widget news feed[/title]
[description]The latest news on widgets[/description]
[link]http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[image]
[title]Widget News[/title]
[url>http://www.widget.com/widget.gif[/url]
[link>http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[/image]
The body of the file is made up of the news items. Each news item is enclosed in the item tag and comprises of a title, a description and a published date. The date needs to be in the format shown in the example below.
[title]Which is the best Widget to?[/title]
[description]In this article we discuss the release of several new widgets, but which is the best widget.[/description]
[pubDate]Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:50 GMT[/pubDate]
[link]http://www.widget.com/the-best-widgets.html[/link]
[/item]
You can have as many items in the feed as you like but many webmasters just show the 10 most recent items to keep the bandwidth usage down and also so not to overwhelm the end user with too many items.
Finally the file is ended with the closing channel tag and a closing RSS tag.
[/channel]
[/rss]
I have covered the basic tags to create an RSS file, there are other tags that can be used and these are explained in the http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss (RSS 2.0) specification.
Once you have created your file you will need to verify it is ok, to do this upload the file to your server and then go to this validator to validate the file. Your file is now ready. Now anyone can subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to your RSS file.
That is the basics covered. I will be covering other areas in future articles as there is far too much information to fit into a single article.
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3 Tips to improve your RSS marketing
3 Tips to improve your RSS marketing
You have created an RSS feed, or maybe you have several feeds and you post at least once a week to keep your RSS subscribers interested. So now you can sit back and watch your hit counter tally up all those extra visitors. Well you may think you have finished but there are a few things you can do to improve things still further.
1. Let browsers and search engines know you have an RSS available.
To do this you need to add a line of HTML to every page that has a link to your RSS feed. The link will be:
link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="title" href="http://www.site.com/rss.xml"
This line will need to be enclosed by angled brackets and placed between your HEAD tags of your page. Once you have done this some search engine bots and web browsers such as Firefox will know you have an RSS feed available.
2. Submit your RSS feed to the RSS and Blog directories.
Like you would submit your site to search engines you can submit your site to RSS specific directories. This will give your RSS greater exposure to an audience that is already interested and educated about the benefits of RSS. This is a list of Alexa ranked RSS directories and another can be found here.
3. Announce that your RSS feed has been updated.
Every time you add a new item to your RSS feed you can announce it to the world, or at least many of the RSS directories. To do this you need to ping each service. If you are using Blogging software your software is probably already doing this for you , check your documentation.
For those of you who do not have software set up to automatically ping for you there is no need to worry. There is a free service at Ping-o-matic that will do this for you.
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RSS Feeds Have Revolutionized the Internet
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Blogs and Networking
In the middle 1990?s everyone started talking about needing a website. Now, the new ?must have? is a web log or blog. While blogs can come in all shapes and sizes, a blog is just a very simple way to publish a journal, record of events, thoughts, ideas or whatever the author wants to write about. A blog sits on a website ? whether that site is run by you or managed by a company that will ?host? your blog.
How To Add Random RSS Content To Your Site
Most savvy internet marketers will know how important it is to have fresh content added to their sites on a daily basis but the problem sometimes is to find the time and/or content. Adding an RSS feed is a good way to add fresh content to a site, but the problem again is that most of them only get updated on a weekly basis.
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