Shared RSS - Syndication for the Rest of Us
RSS Syndication or RSS Newsfeeds (RSS Feeds for short) all refer to the same thing. There are two parts to the process, the publisher, and the consumer. The publisher produces a small text file in a special format that lists the title and address of an article or resource published on the World Wide Web. The consumer uses a program, usually called an aggregator to read and display the contents of that simple text file, with links to the web page. Or the consumer may visit a website that includes an aggregator program, and view the results as a web page. Members of Yahoo.com, for example, can set their personal 'My Yahoo' pages to display the contents of any RSS feeds they select. That is all there is to it. Simple. That's why some people say RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication.' Some confusion has arisen because an RSS feed may be used in several ways. Calling it a 'newsfeed' is the first mistake, since RSS is used for much more than news. The most common situation is for the RSS items listed to have a short title, link to the original web page referred to, and a short description of the contents of that web page. But other people are including the complete contents of their resource directly in the RSS feed. So the feed may contain a graphic image of a cartoon, an entire post to a weblog (or blog), or the complete contents of a newsletter, rather than just a link back to those resources on a web site. Other sites leave out the description, and just list titles linked back to their website. And some versions of RSS allow you to leave out the title, so long as you have a description. Speaking of 'versions' of RSS, that is the source of even more confusion. RSS began with version 0.90, and was called 'RDF Site Summary' -- the RDF refers to 'Resource Description Framework,' the method of labeling different parts of the file. This early version was updated and changed through various incarnations, including 0.91, 0.92, 0.93 and 0.94, and they began to call RSS 'Really Simple Syndication.' Then someone came along with a different format, slightly more complicated, and called it RSS version 1.0. Supporters of version 0.94 didn't like the implication that 1.0 was somehow an advance on 0.94 when in actuality it was a completely different format, so they came up with version 2.0 which was an improved version of 0.94, but still unlike 1.0. Rather than take sides in all this squabbling, someone else came up with their own version and called it Atom, to distance themselves from the RSS battles. Someone else developed Blogrolls that use OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language). Most of these formats are either loosely or strictly based on XML, the parent mark-up scheme. None of this confusion of method and purpose has helped spread this really useful tool. Most RSS aggregators can read any of these formats, so the situation is not as hopeless as it may seem, but many folks still throw the whole thing out when they can't figure out exactly how it is supposed to work. On http://www.SharedRSS.com/ we use version 1.0 because it is endorsed by W3C as being supportive of the 'semantic web.' For the casual user however, the version is really not important. SharedRSS is a simple site that performs a very powerful function ... it brings the benefits of RSS syndication to all those who publish websites, but who add new material too infrequently to warrant having their own RSS feed. RSS Syndication was designed to help people find out about new content on the web, long before the search engines get around to finding it. It makes it easy for people to find out about new content that interests them, without having to return to the search engines and wade through all the material they have seen before. For sites with frequently changing content, it has worked well for them to create their own RSS feed and update it as new content is added to their website. But what about all those sites that only add an occasional new article or story to their website, or who publish a newsletter once per month? Or those who just can't take the time to figure the ins and outs of formatting an RSS feed? An RSS feed that only gets updated once every few months is of little value; very few people will add it to their search list in their aggregator. Shared RSS solves this problem by lumping together articles from different sites covering the same topic, and lets them announce the availability of their new material in a feed shared with others publishing on the same topic. This makes the feeds more useful to the consumer, so they are more likely to add the link to their aggregator. It benefits the publisher by making more people aware of their material as soon as it is put on-line. About The Author Andrew J. Morris is the owner and creator of SharedRSS -- a website that allows all website owners to syndicate their newly added material for FREE. http://www.sharedrss.com/
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How To Display RSS Feeds on Your Website
This article is intended as a guide for webmasters who want to display automatically updated content on their website in the form of RSS feeds. In this article I will cover the easiest method to implement using javascript for displaying RSS on websites to create additional dynamic content. This will allow you to display headlines from syndicated content around the web on your website.
RSS to Javascript.
By far the easiest method is to use client side javascript to parse and display the headlines on your site. To achieve this all you need to do is cut and paste some HTML or javascript code into the web page where you want the RSS feed headlines to display.
To achieve this there are several sites that offer a free service that will allow you to select a few options to choose your feed source and display formatting parameters. You will then be presented with some javascript code that you can cut and paste into your website.
Now before I give you the address of the sites that offer this service freely there are a few points I need to clarify with you. Although you will achieve your goal of displaying dynamic content on your site in a few short minutes there are some downsides to this method.
Javascript is not search engine friendly.
As you may or may not already know, javascript is not visible to search engine spiders. They will not see the RSS feed you have parsed into your site and so this will not benefit you if you are doing this to better your search engine rankings.
You are using a third party service.
The second potential downside is that although the javascript is on your site you are actually calling a script on another server. This could lead to a couple of potential problems. If the server is busy it will mean the news feed will take longer to display on your site. The other point is if the third party server fails or disappears altogether then your feed will not be displayed at all.
In summary there are a few downsides, but if you do not code and want some feeds on your site quickly then this is the way to go. Ok, so now you understand what is involved here are the links to the sites that provide the free RSS to javascript service. All you need to do is follow the on site instructions.
Feed2JS
RSS2HTML
RSS-to-Javascript
FeedSweep
RSS Xpress Lite
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Now that was quite a big paragraph, you've got to wonder if I really needed to say as much as I just did to introduce this article on the best way to write your blogs on the Web. I didn't even mention this main idea, and that's what an introduction paragraph is meant to be for. This is a common mistake in many blogs out there. We try to get too many ideas across in one paragraph, sometimes even in one sentence! The key, as in all things in life-is to keep it simple. Simplicity means that readers won't get confused about what your journal entry is actually about. Introduce your main general topic at the start, and use the subsequent paragraphs to discuss separate ideas that relate to this topic. Try to tie everything up in the concluding paragraph, your main argument and the reason why you've written in the first place.
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