RSS Feeds On Your Website

Several clients are asking me to create and embed RSS feeds on their sites these days, so it seems like a good time to review what these are and how to use them.

Intro to RSS

RSS Feeds have been in use for 10 years, but still feel like a new technology, one that's still expanding to new audiences and finding new uses. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and turns online content into a simple, (mostly) text-based series of articles. Gone are the styles and graphics on a web page, with only the text remaining. These lists of text-based articles are called a "feed." The advantage is that the content can easily be distributed across a variety of platforms, letting users quickly scan headlines and short descriptions from a variety of websites at once, and choose which ones to view.

Why a website owner should be interested in RSS Feeds is also simple. Do you want to reach as wide an audience as possible with your content, and improve search engine results? Then create an RSS Feed. If you want your site content to be found, why not explore all options? Popular blogs like Engadet or the Huffington Post, as well as services like Facebook and Twitter are essentially "feeds" of information. Be part of the trend.

How to Make an RSS Feed

To generate an RSS Feed, it's best to start with a list of some kind (stories, news posts, products for sale, etc.) and then generate a "feed" of your content.

Creating an RSS Feed isn't hard. In fact, it's quite easy if your website is built upon a content management system such as Drupal or WordPress. With a WordPress blog, all the articles you create are automatically generated in an RSS Feed, and embedded on your site. You're done!

With Drupal, this is also automatic if you are posting all content to the home page (front page) in a blog style. Or, one of the killer features with Drupal is that you can create RSS Feeds from any type of content, on any page or section of your site. Create RSS feeds for ecommerce products, news items, jobs, real estate listings, or whatever type of content you like.  (For the tech-minded, this is accomplished with Views, a Drupal module.)

Note that when creating an RSS Feed, it makes the most sense to do so for content that's changing over time, such as Recent News or Product Sales. Creating a feed for a static page, such as About Us, doesn't make much sense. The purpose of a feed is to continuously "feed" it data.

Ideally, you want software that will generate and update your RSS Feed automatically, but if that's not possible, there are other options. If you don't have a tool like Drupal or Wordpress, you can learn to manually create your feed, following the coding instructions and using a simple text editor. If you are comfortable with code like HTML, this isn't hard to do, following the online instructions. Or there are services such as Feedity or Dapp Factory that will generate an RSS feed for you from an HTML page. Once you have a feed, you need people to see it. The next step is to embed it on a website.

Embedding your feed on a web page

When you browse various sites now, you will often notice the familiar orange RSS icon somewhere on the page, indicating a feed is present, or better still, most modern browsers tell you a feed is present by showing some kind of RSS icon in the URL bar across the top of the page. Clicking on that icon will give you the feed.

So how do you get your newly created RSS Feed to show on your website?

You embed it. Again, with WordPress or Drupal, this is either automatic or done using tools within those programs. If you need to embed it yourself, there are many options to choose from, but you're going to have to paste the code on your website somewhere, so it will require access to the files that make up your web pages. You can generate a "Widget" from an RSS feed at a site like Widgetbox. This will let you paste in the URL of your RSS Feed, and generate the code you need to use, to embed on to your web page. Google Gadgets is another method that will do most the work for you. Take the generated code, and paste in to the code of your web page, and save/upload the file to the web server.

3rd party feeds

Embedding RSS feeds from 3rd party sources is a way to keep content fresh and relevant on your site, without having to write it yourself. WIth an Aggregator, we can subscribe to any RSS feed, and designate a page or sidebar on your own site for the results to appear. Think of it as subscribing to a new source, much like you'd add news feeds to a Yahoo home page or iGoogle page.

We can set your site to refresh the feeds at certain times, set a maximum number of items from each feed to show and so on. Drupal supports this with its built-in Aggregator module, and with WordPress, you can use plugins like FeedWordPress. Yahoo Pipes is an online service that will guide you to creating your own collections of RSS Feeds and gives you the code needed to embed them on your site.

Search engine results as RSS Feed

Want to show the latest Google results for a search term on your site? For example, you want to include search for "Minnesota Politics" on your news site. You can do it, with Google Alerts. Google Alerts let you track certain search terms, and notify you of the results on a regular basis. Email is one option for receiving the "alerts", but a RSS feed is another.

Go to Google Alerts, define your search term, and under "deliver" options, select "feed." Copy the RSS feed it generates, and embed it on your site. It's Google, so you know it's free.

MORE TO LEARN

There's more to learn about RSS feeds and how they're being used then I can explain here. Here's some resources for more info:

• Wikepedia:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
• What is RSS and RSS Feeds:
  http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=79408
  http://www.press-feed.com/howitworks/what-is-RSS.php
• RSS Toolbox- 120 RSS Resources
  http://mashable.com/2007/06/11/rss-toolbox/

• Web Tech