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| Making your first RSS feed |
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| The RSS success
story grows everyday with increasing numbers
of web masters adding RSS feeds to their sites.
Web masters use RSS feeds to distribute the
latest content. RSS feeds also solve critical
on-line problems like a lack of traffic, a
low conversion rate, a lack of repeat visitors
and keeping target markets updated. Web sites,
big and small, including The New York Times,
ABCNews.com and CNN.com have shown faith in
RSS technology, so it’s a wise decision
to add RSS feeds to your web site and make
them available for distribution using the
Active
Web Reader Customizer. |
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| This article explains the
entire process for jumping on the RSS bandwagon,
from adding RSS feeds to your web site to
promoting them in an effective, orderly manner. |
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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 yardstick
in measuring what to distribute via RSS is
to first identify content that changes frequently.
Second, determine that it’s information
important enough to present to your viewers
ASAP. |
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| 2. Making RSS feeds |
| RSS has different formats
like 0.9 x, 1.x and 2.x. Controversy still
ensues over the best RSS format due to the
lack of open RSS standards. However, most
RSS readers are able to view all the major
formats. RSS 0.91 is still the most popular
format, recognized by most RSS Readers. |
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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, should be present
in an XML file. You list the URL of that XML
file as a link in the list of RSS feeds 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 |
| The first line of code is
the same for all RSS 0.91 feeds: |
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| <rss>:
This tag describes a mandatory version
attribute. It appears only once in your
RSS feed. You need to close your document
with a corresponding </rss> tag. |
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| <channel>:
The channel is the fundamental container
for all RSS data — there's only
one channel in a feed. The channel tag
gets closed toward the end of the feed. |
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| <title>:
Indicates the title of the document.
This is most likely going to be the
same title given to your homepage. |
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| <link>:
The URL for the webpage on which your
RSS feed is present (Most likely, this
is your homepage's URL.) |
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| <description>:
A brief description of what's
in the feed, 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,
it cannot contain <, >, or & characters.
Rather, 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. The next step is to Promote
your RSS feeds. |
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