Making a feed for your website

Making a feed really isn't too hard.

a few of the benefits of having a feed are:
Keep your customers or visitors updated on news
Gain links to your site from other webmasters using your feed
Getting traffic to your site from people using news readers

Making a feed manually is easy here's how:
What's used is a language called XML (similar to html).
And here is what a simple feed looks like:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
(lets programs and bots now its an xml file)
<rss version="2.0" >
(lets programs and bots know what version of RSS is being used)
<channel>
(this tag appears once and is the opening tag of your feed)
<title>Feed Title</title>
(the title of your feed)
<description>The explanation of what youre entire feed is about goes here </description>
(an overall explanation of what your feed is about)
<link>http://www.yourlinks.com</link>

Items are the pieces that are displayed in the news reader or on the website that uses your feed
<item>
<description>The description goes here</description>
<link>http://www.linkgoeshere.com</link>
</item>

</channel>
(close the channel)
</rss>
(close RSS)

Now lets use an example, lets say I have a website that sells fishing gear and I want to have a feed with fishing news. It could look like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<description>News and updates about fishing</description>
<link>http://www.feedcastsfishingsite.com</link>
<item>
<description>On the weekend Jimmy caught several large bass by using the new FeedCast Lure. Using a Penn Real with the ....etc etc</description>
<link>http://www.feedcastfishingsite.com/feedcastlures</link> </item>
</channel>
</rss>

Now after writing this I save the file as an .xml and upload it to the root of my server. For example I named the file and saved it as fishfeed.xml so to view it with a feed reader I point that reader to feedcastfishingsite.com/fishfeed.xml

And when I want to update the feed I simple add a new 'item'.



rss Syndication Feeds

Displaying feeds on your web site

In the last post I covered a basic introduction to RSS, In this post we''ll look at how to display those feeds on your website.

Displaying an RSS feed on your website can have various benefits like:
Providing your visitors with updating information
Keeping your website 'fresh' in the eyes of search engines

There are two different scripts I use to display rss feeds on my sites and they are:
RSS2HTML from the site http://www.feedforall.com
RSS Fetch from the site http://www.neoprogrammers.com

RSS Fetch is pretty cool as it allows you to 'cache' the feed and set the period for updates of that cache, this helps to reduce requeasts to the server responsible for the feed and improves the loading time of your site.

Both of these rss scripts have the ability to modify a feed template so as to display the feed how you wish on your site.

What is RSS?

RSS is an alternative view of a web page that allows you to subscribe and read the content in RSS newsreader software. Whenever the web page is updated your newsreader will automatically display the new item.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and stemmed from RDF (Resource Description Framework ) which was created back in 1997. Version 2.0 of RSS was created by Dave Winer and is now is now licensed under a Creative Commons license and owned by Havard Law School.

On a web page that has a RSS feed you will generally see a logo like one of these:



Then click on the logo and you will be taken to a raw code view of the feed which is in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) although this isn't very readable. What's required is an Aggregator which is a program that can run on your desktop or a number of services can be found online. Try one of these to get started:

http://www.blogbridge.com/
A free aggregator which runs on your desktop suitable for Windows, Mac and Linux.

http://www.2rss.com/news/
Provides a free online rss feed reader.

Once you have an Aggregator or a feed reader service simply cut and paste the URL of the feed into your feed reader and you then have a formatted readable version which updates whenever the feed is updated.

RSS feeds are a great way to keep updated on news and information, website updates and much more.