Creating an RSS Feed Manually

Let’s manually compose a basic RSS feed. Assume that we want to generate a feed about documentation standards and guidelines significant to the IT industry. Within this feed, we can embrace a number topics such as:

- Writing style

- Concern of correct grammar, punctuation, and spellings

- Sentence arrangement

- Guidelines for writing technical documents, white papers, installations sheets, customer service feature manuals, and user guides

- Sample templates

- Tips for conforming to international standards

- Superiority of avoiding or enclosing colloquialism

- Rules for reviewing and editing

- Charges for writing beginners, experienced, and experts

Each topic identified before forms an item for the RSS feed. Our first item can be written as follows

Item Title Writing Style

Item Construction

The purpose of a document and its audience define its writing style. A formal present such as a white paper or a management report must have the formal tone. In contrast, a user guide musts to be written in a more friendly tone. Learn more about writing style and construct result-oriented documents.

Gather similar news for all content to be included in the feed. This data forms item info part of the RSS feed.

Using the Basic RSS Feed Format

The next course after collecting the feed information is to put in a standard format, which the Internet browsers and RSS aggregators can sense and interpret to show it correctly on your PC. The format for this file is as follows:

Insert feed title

Insert feed URL

Insert feed Description

en-us

Insert date and time

Insert title of the first item

Insert URL of the detailed article for the first item

Insert Explanation of the first item

Insert author’s email address (Author’s name)

Insert item spreading date

Insert title of the second item

Insert URL of the detailed article for the second item

Insert Explanation of the second item

Insert author’s email address (Author’s name)

Insert item broadcasting date

:

:

Notice that there is only one example of the channel tag, whereas numerous frequencys of the item tag. The number of item tags should be the same as the number of elements you want to embed in your RSS feed.

The tags in red bring out the extra news you can embed in an RSS feed. This information is not obligatory, but gives the article more credibility and offers the readers an option of communicating with the author.

The purpose of a document and its audience define its writing style. A formal arising such as a white paper or a management report must have the formal tone. In alternative, a

Use the hereinbefore format to add newsletter for other items and your feed is settled!

Assign the feed a name and save it. Many and various RSS resources say that all RSS feeds have the extension .rss or .xml. In reality, however, an RSS feed can have any extension or no file extension. Respective RSS feed generating software written in hypertext preprocessor (PHP) use the .php extension for the feeds they create. It is also for the benefit of keeping things simple and filenames indicating their content that people might add .rss or .xml extensions to RSS feeds.

You can put together as several part as you want though try not to exceed beyond 10 index per feed for usability reasons.

In an RSS feed, index are typically arranged in the reverse chronological order with the existent item being the first one and the oldest item at the end, just like news headlines.

Even if you are new to Internet, you can no doubt create an RSS feed as long as you follow this basic feed format and you have importance content to publish.

Click the Validate button for code validation to begin and wait for some time to view message informing you about subsistence or absence of any errors in the file. If the validator reports any errors, fix them, and recheck the code until all errors are fixed.

Adding Digital Media

Adding digital media containing images, audio, and video can transport your audience to a unusual realm. With this capability, your messages become alike more personalized and blend that human touch to the process.

Without actually embracing an audio file, you can integrate a recognized link in your RSS feed directing the users towards a file which when selected allows the surfers to download it. The subscribers can refer to it repeatedly and when ever they want to.

Moreover, RSS 2.0 supports a new feature named inclusion to enable feed creators enclose digital media content. When an appropriate inclusion reading software comes across such a feed item, it reads the accompanying link and content form to automatically download it and store it on a media device.

Using Software to Construct an RSS Feed

Software offers many and various advantages over manual:

- No requirement of any technical knowledge including that of XML or HTML.

- Spell check to eliminate spelling mistakes from feeds.

- No have to validate your feed.

- Eases the process of updating a feed.

- The option of adding your operation logo thereby giving an identity to the feed.

The next part will be about: “Tips for Creating Powerful RSS Feeds”

If you can’t wait till the next part release, or you can’t discover the first 3 parts please download the extensive report from our web site in the downloads area.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method of taking content and syndicating it out to multiple sites. It was primarily aimed at newsfeeds and providing content from news sites to other sites.

Like many other technologies, it has been hi-jacked by Internet Marketers who have found this is an excellent way to get backlinks. It allows you to syndicate your content to hundreds of other websites at a click of a button, which in turn will boost your site in the search engine rankings.

In order to use RSS syndication, you have to have an RSS feed from your website. The easiest way to do this is to use Wordpress when creating your website. There are ways of making RSS feeds from normal HTML websites, but it is not always as simple as you may think. Quite often it involves a manual process and manual submission of files. However, there are a few websites that will automatically convert HTML to RSS for you.

Once you have an RSS feed you need to find some places to submit it.

There are two types of site you want to find.

Firstly you are looking for RSS directories. A quick Google will bring up plenty of directories you can use. There is software available you can buy which will automate the submission for you.

Once you have found your directories you want to submit your RSS feeds to them. Manually it isn’t the fastest process, but it can be outsourced. You need to have your keywords, a title and sometimes a description prepared, but that won’t take long.

It is often worth using different descriptions, titles and keywords to ensure each submission is unique. What level of difference this actually makes no one is quite sure, but it does appear to help.

If you are manually submitting RSS feeds then you must keep track of which sites you have submitted where. The reason being you don’t want to submit the same site more than once. Plus, you are likely to want to submit other sites in the future.

The second type of site is the RSS Aggregator. This is a site which takes a number of RSS feeds and combines them into a single feed or webpage. This single feed can be submitted to RSS directories, further increasing your backlinks.

The RSS aggregator can be useful to mix up your RSS feeds on a topic with feeds from news sites on the same topic. This will provide a higher level of authority and provide more bulk to the content.

When using RSS feeds, you need to also remember that many Web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo and many article directories have RSS feeds for the pages you create. These can also be submitted to RSS directories and aggregators in order to further increase links and boost rankings.

Your RSS feed submissions will be updated every time you update your webpage. Therefore, if you are regularly adding new content, you can find it syndicated out to many websites very quickly, gaining you backlinks to your site.

RSS feeds are a great way to get additional backlinks and to help your sites rank well for their keywords. Use them, enjoy them and see the links flooding in.

Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik

RSS is certainly still far from being user-friendly, which is especially evident once you try and left-click on an RSS subscribe button.

In most cases your browser will simply display the XML code of the RSS feed … which does not go far in making internet users comftorable with RSS.

Heck, if you didn’t know what RSS was and clicked on an RSS button only to get a page full of code you don’t understand, would that aid in turning you in to an RSS user?

Probably no. And much worse, you’d probably never consider clicking on one of those buttons again, at least not any time soon.

Consequently, if as a marketer you’re trying to generate RSS subscribers, simply using an RSS subscribe button is the worst way to go for you and for the RSS industry as a whole as well.

So, what alternatives are there?

a] CREATE AN RSS PRESENTATION PAGE

If you’re trying to generate RSS subscribers from your site and are targeting audiences that might not be farmiliar with RSS, you need at least a basic presentation of what RSS is on your site, and you need to link to that either directly from the RSS subscribe button or from a location right next to that button, like you can see on the MarketingStudies.net example.

On this page you should explain in easy-to-understand terms what RSS is, how your visitors can use it and how they’ll benefit, and then provide links to some RSS readers and again links to your RSS feeds.

This page will be instrumental in telling your visitors about RSS and helping them subscribe to your feeds.

And of course, the feeds themselves and the RSS presentation page should be promoted in prominent locations on your website, especially directly below your e-mail e-zine subscription box and, if you’re publishing topic oriented feeds, next to their respective topics on the site, just as Lockergnome.com is doing.

B] TRANSFORM AN RSS FEED IN TO XHTML

Having a link to an RSS presentation page right next to your RSS subscribe button does aid visitors in learning about RSS and helps them to subscribe, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of a user actually clicking on an RSS feed button. That will still result in the visitor getting heaps of code he really won’t know what to do with.

Going one step further, you can use XSL Transformations to make sure that the feed can in fact also be displayed in a browser (without making it useless for an RSS reader as well) … and that with some additional information and instructions, such as a brief overview of RSS and a quick explanation on how the user can subscribe to this feed via an RSS reader.

I don’t want to get technical here, so to see what I mean simply click on this link (via FeedBurner): http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2

This is basically an RSS feed, which has been transformed in order to be displayed in a Web browser with some additional information, but can still be subscribed to via every RSS reader as well.

Some feed maintanance and publishing services such as FeedBurner already provide this functionality “out-of-the-box”, without you having to do practically anything. All you need to do is register for their free service, enter your feed and then get this link, which you will place “behind” the RSS subscribe button on your site, as a link, instead of a direct link to your RSS feed.

If you don’t want to use a third-party service like FeedBurner, you can actually do the XSL Transformations by yourself. More information on how to do this is available at Wikiedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xslt).

c] TAKING THE MIDDLE ROAD: SMARTER SUBSCRIBE BUTTONS If you don’t want to use a third-party service such as FeedBurner or if your RSS vendor does not provide this functionality or if you don’t want to be bothered with doing XSLT by yourself, there is actually an alternative you can use.

David Battino at MacDevCenter.com (http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/7821) just wrote a simple piece of code you can use instead of the typical link to your RSS feed behind the RSS feed subscription button, which will, after you click on the link, display a simple message saying that in order to subscribe to the feed you need to copy and paste this URL in your your RSS reader.

This certainly doesn’t go very far in making RSS more user-friendly, as the notification really can’t be used to explain what RSS is and why your visitors should use it, but it at least saves the visitor from getting the XML code in his browser and hating RSS before he or she even find out what it is.

The simple code to do so is http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/7821

Also, do not forget about using buttons like Add To MyYahoo!, since many MyYahoo! users for example don’t know what RSS is, but they will use this button to subscribe.

d] TARGETING EXISTING RSS USERS

If you’re targeting existing RSS users or at least users that won’t be put off by a long list of names they won’t be able to understand, using the free script from Methodize.org might be the solution.

When the user hovers his mouse above your RSS feed subscribe button, the script will display a long list of RSS readers that the visitors can use to directly subscribe to the feed. By simply clicking on the appropriate link, the user will quickly subscribe to the feed with the RSS reader he is currently using.

There’s also a “What’s this” link at the bottom of the list, but still many visitors will be put off by long list of RSS reader names they won’t be able to understand, before even being motivated enough to click on the “What’s this” link at the bottom.

But still, if you’re targeting a more technical or internet oriented audiences, this just might do the trick.

The script is available from here: http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/

e] USING RSS AUTODISCOVERY

RSS Autodiscovery is a very nice feature that allows certain RSS Autodiscovery-enabled browsers to find a feed on your site and promptly offer the subscribe option to the visitor.

While most browsers still do not support this, FireFox for example does.

Using RSS Autodiscovery can’t substitute the other options above, but it will serve you well for the small part of your audience that’s using RSS Autodiscovery-enabled browsers.

How to use this?

Simply place the following piece of code in to the HEAD section of the HTML code of your webpages:

[link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" onClick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/article_exit_link');" href="http://rssdiary.marketingstudies.net/index.xml" /]

And don’t forget to replace the [ and ] characters with < and >.

f] STRONG COPY

No matter how many times we write this, it still needs repeating. The best way to get your visitors to subscribe is to entice them to do so with strong copy that provides clear and valuable benefits, explaining to the visitor exactly why he needs to subscribe to exactly your RSS feed.