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Active Web Reader Customizer
v1.24 |
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Making your
first RSS feed |
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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. |
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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. |
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1. Identifying
content to distribute via RSS |
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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.. |
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2. Making RSS
feeds |
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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. |
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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: |
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<?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> |
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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. |
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Understanding
Basic RSS tags |
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The first
line of code is the same for all RSS 0.91 feeds: |
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| <rss>:
All RSS files must begin with <rss> and end with
</rss>. These tags can each appear only once in an RSS
feed. |
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| <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. |
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| <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. |
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| <link>:
The URL of the web page that hosts the RSS feeds. |
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| <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.” |
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| <language>:
This identifies the language used in the feed.
"en-us" is American English, which is
what most web sites use. |
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| <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. |
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| <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. |
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| <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. |
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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. |
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Once you become more
familiar with RSS, you can enhance your feeds by using
more tags. |
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