Making and promoting your RSS feeds

Articles

1.	Making your first RSS feed
2.	Marketing and promoting your RSS feeds
3.	How to make your own custom version of Active Web Reader

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Active Web Reader Customizer v1.24

Making your first RSS feed

The RSS success story gets bigger every day, with more web masters adding feeds to their sites. RSS feeds keep viewer's up-to-date with the latest news and changes from a website and solve critical on-line problems like a lack of traffic, a low conversion rate, and a lack of repeat visitors. Web sites, big and small, including The New York Times, ABCNews.com, IBM, and Dow Jones are using RSS technology as a way to keep their customers interested and involved. It makes sense for you to add RSS feeds to your web site and make it easy for your customers and viewers to read them by using Active Web Reader Customizer.

This article explains how to create an RSS feed for your site. After you have done this, it's time to Promote Your RSS Feeds.

1. Identifying content to distribute via RSS

Active Web Reader Customizer - Type of Content used for making your first RSS feed

Almost any type of content can be distributed via RSS. It has become a popular choice for distributing news, product updates and content summaries. A useful way to think about what to distribute this way is to look for content that changes frequently, and is important to your audience. Don't make the mistake of trying to push out information that only matters only to you—to hold your audience's attention, your feed must seem vital to them..

2. Making RSS feeds

There are several RSS standards, including 0.9 x, 1.x and 2.x. There is still argument about which is the best. However, most RSS readers are able to view all the major versions. In this article our examples will use RSS 0.91, which is the simplest of the standards.

Let’s look at a basic code snippet in RSS 0.91, to help get you started on adding an RSS feed to your web site. This code, along with the enhancements you might wish to add later, would be saved as an XML file (for instance, myfeedlist.xml). To let your viewers use the list, create a link to the URL of the XML file on your RSS feed web page. This example only contains one item (or link); you can scale it to multiple items by simply adding more <item> tags:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="0.91">
<channel>
<title>My RSS Feed</title>
<link>http://myhomepage.com</link>
<description>Here is a description of my RSS feed</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<item>
<title>This is first news item of my RSS feed</title>
<description>This is brief teaser...</description>
<link>http://www.myhomepage/firstnewsitem.xml</link>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

RSS is based on XML. An RSS feed should be properly coded to be viewed by RSS readers. The example demonstrates only the most important tags in RSS. Once you're familiar with these basic tags, you can enhance your feed by adding more tags for images, copyright information, author information, publication date, formatting tags etc.

Understanding Basic RSS tags

The first line of code is the same for all RSS 0.91 feeds:


<rss>: All RSS files must begin with <rss> and end with </rss>. These tags can each appear only once in an RSS feed.

<channel>: All RSS data is in the channel, and there is only one channel in a particular feed. The </channel> tag ends the channel information, and is normally the last tag before the </rss> tag that ends the file.

<title>: The title of the channel, which will be displayed as the title of the window when your viewers open the RSS feed. Often this will be the same as the title of the web page. The maximum length is 100 characters.

<link>: The URL of the web page that hosts the RSS feeds.

<description>: A brief description of what's in the channel, or the purpose of your site. For example, you can write something like, “This web site delivers breaking news as it happens.”

<language>: This identifies the language used in the feed. "en-us" is American English, which is what most web sites use.

<item>: This wrapper tag is required around every item. Each <item> represents a separate story or content update. When you update your site and add new stories, simply add new <item> tags to your XML document.

<link>: The URL to the document that will open when the feed is selected in the RSS reader. This could be a normal html page, containing more details and content.

<description>: A summary or excerpt of the item, which will be displayed in the RSS reader. The description should be easy to read and enticing enough for your audience to click on it and read the entire document. You can also choose to add the entire content within the description tag, but it isn’t recommended because it runs counter to the purpose of RSS – to enable viewers to scan through pages quickly.

One very important thing to note is that since RSS is based on XML, you cannot type the <, >, or & characters (except as part of tags). They must be replaced by <, >, and &, respectively.

Once you become more familiar with RSS, you can enhance your feeds by using more tags.