RSS Feed Syndication

Putting RSS Feeds into your site can increase your exposure dramatically. There are many news services now that constantly scan the internet for these files to gather interesting articles and other information. Technorati and Digg are 2 good examples of these services.

This new (well, not so new) format allows people to bookmark your articles and/or information in a more organized and easy to read way. You can get stand-alone readers, browser integrated readers or now you can add these “feeds” to your own favorite online reader service and Homepages like Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are 2 basic types of feeds- RSS and Atom, but which ever you choose to use make sure you follow the technical guidelines to get the most out of it. Always use valid markup for these files just like you would for a regular html or php page. The W3C offers a validator for RSS Feeds.

Many Blogs and CMS programs have added this option into their programs to automatically generate these files but even if you have an html site you can create your own. For examples and specs visit Technology at Harvard Law.

Firefox and now IE7 browsers have the ability to discover these feeds and notify you that one is available by displaying a small icon in the URL box. Adding the tag into the head portion of your html document or template so browsers can discover the feed is very similar to adding a favicon tag. In this example I have left off the end brackets so you can see the tag.

link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”My RSS Feed” xhref=”news.xml”

These types of bookmarks called Live Bookmarks have the ability to update dynamically when the files content is changed or you can specify in your reader the time intervals to check for updates. One good feed service is FeedBurner which helps you syndicate and publish your feeds. I have also used AddThis because of the stats tracking ability and they offer a social bookmarking option which also has statistics. This allows you to track statistics like how many people have subscribed to your feed and demographic information. This is really just a small part of what is available out there. If you search for feed services, feed generators or RSS XML you will find more information than you know what to do with.

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Written by Kelly Welsh on March 18th, 2007 with no comments.
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