Introduction to Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
Really Simple Syndication is exactly what it's name states. A very simple way to syndicate your websites contents to other websites and news reading programs. This article describes the benefits of creating an RSS feed, and not how to produce one, or integrate other peoples RSS feeds in to your website. RSS is a lightweight XML design with a very easy format, very similar to HTML tags. Simply put, an RSS feed is a file that has a title, description, and link to your content. Implementing an RSS feed on your website takes a very short time and is a great way to drive traffic to your website. But don't think that article writers are the only ones who can benefit from this form of information dissemination, it has many great practical purposes. RSS gives you the ability to have a list produced that can be integrated in part, or whole in to another website. RSS gives you the ability to have other websites have up to date, accurate information from you online in seconds. Headline news, technical articles, website updates, security alerts, or your favorite food recipes are just a few of the things that you can syndicate! You would be surprised at how many websites have RSS feeds that you may not have noticed, generally you can identify a website that syndicates their content by a graphic (normally at the bottom) that says "RSS" or "XML" or identifies in other ways that their articles are syndicated. In addition to people receiving your syndicated articles over websites, there are many websites who keep up to date databases of RSS feeds. You can search their websites for your favorite topics and see what feeds provide information you like, then have it mailed to you, or browse it online. In addition web browsers such as Mozilla FireFox have introduced the live bookmark concept, which allows you to add dynamic content such as RSS feeds to your favorites, this creates a folder in your favorites and that folder polls your favorite feeds from time to time to keep you up to date all the time! Really Simple Syndication is a great way to get way for webmasters to provide a valuable service to their users, other websites that may rely on them, and increase your traffic and reputation. Ken Dennis
http://KenDennis-RSS.homeip.net/
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RELATED ARTICLES
What are Blogs and How Do You Profit from Them?
'Blogs' or 'Blogging' have existed for several years and there are still many people who don't know what one is and how important it is to making you money.
Why Every Artist Needs a Blog & How to Create an Artist Blog
As an artist, the key to selling more artwork is maximizing its exposure. The internet is an increasingly popular tool for promoting original art, and if done properly, can be quite profitable.
Shorten Your Blogging-RSS Learning and Submission Curve
A blog is a frequent, online publication of comments, web links, and news. It is an online Enzine of sorts. People maintained blogs long before the term was coined, but the trend gained momentum with automated published systems, most notably is blogger.com. Thousands of people use services such as Blogger alone.
Writing Good Blogs
There's a lot of blogs out there on the Web, most of which don't entice one to go back regularly to read updates. What is missing from these on-line journals that would essentially make them 'good' blogs? Well, the answers in life usually come down to simplicities. So let's look at the problem like we were children. Children don't complicate life with miscellaneous information, and when they speak they tell you straight to the point exactly how they feel and think about a subject.
First of all, we should ask the questions," Why do blogs exist? And what are they here for?" Well, in an ideal world 'good' blogs would help people connect, sharing knowledge and feelings about issues in life. As they are journals written by individuals we would hope that they'd be readable and open to comment by all other people, not just a select group of friends. The key is speaking in a way that is understandable by the masses, get rid of acronyms and local slang that only few will comprehend. Keep the sentences grammatically simple and generally short and concise.
Try to write in your blog as often as possible because if people enjoy reading your thoughts and ideas they'll want to communicate or at least be filled in regularly on 'your world'. Ask questions, comment on other blogs of similar content, start communities with others you've never met, based on your interests. Keep focused; if your blog is about thoughts on war and peace, keep your thoughts on the latest movie and how hungry you are for somewhere else. The idea is to incite intelligent communication so that in time our collective stockpile of knowledge and wisdom will gradually grow like a tree in fertile soil.
I think of most importance is the fact that you want this journal to be 'good' reading. Of course we all have ideas about what genres and styles we like, but writing from your heart and soul is imperative for the connection with others that you're looking for. Share yourself; don't hide behind walls of fear of ridicule and judgment. In real life relationships trust, respect, intimacy, and unity are all necessary for a bond to form. It's the same in the 'virtual' world; people want to hear from real people-not just one-sided, highly opinionated arguments from egos that don't want to hear the 'other side of the coin'.
Now, in my last article I really tore apart most writers out there, and here I'm giving some pretty complex ideas on how to fix the problem of 'bad' writing. In my next article I'll attempt to go back to the simple basics of how to write for beginners. I hope I haven't come across as too judgmental, I just truly believe the 'blog world' could become a real asset to humanity, and at the moment it's missing the mark.
Ideas about sentence structure, grammar, paragraphing, using a thesaurus (varying terms used so as not to sound repetitive), whether or not your blog is suitable for a personal or professional approach, are all important to creating a simple and enjoyable read for the blogging visitor. If you are a beginner, please check out my next article on the basics.
How to Create an RSS Feed
An RSS news feed can be used to communicate with your target audience. It is an ideal means of notifying people of new content on your website without the need for them to keep on visiting your site. You can send newsletters to your readership without having to use email and risk being accused of spamming. You will be comfortable in the knowledge that people who request your feed are actually interested in it because they have actively subscribed to it. This article will explain just how to create your own RSS news feed.
There are a couple of ways to create an RSS file, you can use an editor designed for the purpose or you can create a file using a simple text editor. The latter will require you to learn some XML whilst the former will do the hard part for you. First off I will describe an RSS file, there are several versions and I will be showing you version 2.0, the latest RSS version.
An RSS file looks just like an HTML file except it has different tags and the files end in .rss or .xml rather than .html. The file is made up of header information and item information, the item information contains the actual news items.
The first section of the file contains the header information. This states that the file is XML and which version, the encoding used and the version of RSS that you are using. This part of the file is mandatory. Next up is the channel tag, this encloses the whole of the rest of the file. This is followed by a title, description and link which explain the what the feed is about and what website it is associated with. The final part of the header is the optional image information. If you use this the software that is used to parse or read your file can display a small picture such as a logo.
Please note that in these examples I have used square brackets instead of angled brackets.
[?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?]
[rss version="2.0"]
[channel]
[title]The Widget news feed[/title]
[description]The latest news on widgets[/description]
[link]http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[image]
[title]Widget News[/title]
[url>http://www.widget.com/widget.gif[/url]
[link>http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[/image]
The body of the file is made up of the news items. Each news item is enclosed in the item tag and comprises of a title, a description and a published date. The date needs to be in the format shown in the example below.
[title]Which is the best Widget to?[/title]
[description]In this article we discuss the release of several new widgets, but which is the best widget.[/description]
[pubDate]Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:50 GMT[/pubDate]
[link]http://www.widget.com/the-best-widgets.html[/link]
[/item]
You can have as many items in the feed as you like but many webmasters just show the 10 most recent items to keep the bandwidth usage down and also so not to overwhelm the end user with too many items.
Finally the file is ended with the closing channel tag and a closing RSS tag.
[/channel]
[/rss]
I have covered the basic tags to create an RSS file, there are other tags that can be used and these are explained in the http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss (RSS 2.0) specification.
Once you have created your file you will need to verify it is ok, to do this upload the file to your server and then go to this validator to validate the file. Your file is now ready. Now anyone can subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to your RSS file.
That is the basics covered. I will be covering other areas in future articles as there is far too much information to fit into a single article.
How and Why to RSS
RSS feeds and blogs (and blog and pinging) are part of the latest hyper-frenzy in internet marketing. Tools and services are mushrooming all over. But there seem to be some rather distorted ideas about all this.
RSS Latest News - Blogging or Blagging?
The RSS latest news suggests that RSS can stand for 'Really Simple Syndication', 'Rich Site Summary' or probably other interpretations of the acronym. An RSS tool is one that can deliver the technology where it is required.
Gentlemen Prefer Blogs
According to a recent survey, gentlemen prefer blogs to the tune of 75 percent; roughly 25 percent of blog frequenters are female. But I want to invite all you ladies to invade the male space. What exactly is a blog? Well, it is an online journal or tabla rasa in the Internet zone where average people can post articles and comments, expostulate, and generally schmooze about topics ranging from food to politics.
It Really Is Simple RSS
I have 'Googlebot' coming to my site every day since a month ago I put up my first news feed, since then I have put up yet another.
5 New Internet Marketing Opportunities Through RSS
When it comes to new internet marketing opportunities for your business, RSS just might be the answer you were looking for. Here are just some of the new opportunities it can provide you with ?
3 Overlooked Ways to Get Hundreds of Links and Prospects to Your Blog
Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds?
No matter what you market on the internet at some point you'll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we'll focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to your site using a blog.
The third most overlooked way to bring traffic to your site with a blog is to read and comment on other blogs.
Now, maybe you've done this before but stopped, because you're
becoming concerned about being considered a link-spammer. In
that case, leave a link to your site after your comments, instead of in the comment form that hot links it.
In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this will become less of a concern.
Besides, getting clicks from people who read comments, or visits from search engine spiders through your comments, isn't necessarily your direct objective, though it's definitely a plus.
What you want to do via commenting is to enter the blog community that corresponds to your target market. Get to know who the players are and make agreements with them to cycle traffic between you.
Or lurk to find out where your target market typically hangs out when they're online ? you'd be surprised at how many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can find through this method.
(If you're looking to get linked, there's another way that we'll go over next.)
This tip alone has earned me a few dozen links from prominent blogs in the past four days alone.
These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because they send targeted traffic from established sources, and come from experts with records of proven results.
You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the quality of the information they share.
The second method to more blog traffic is the most confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason its benefits remain overlooked.
In the simplest of terms, Trackback is kind of a remote commenting system that incorporates linking. It allows the reader to follow a topic around the web to see other bloggers remark on the same subject. It enables the publisher to remotely cite references to the issue on which they've written.
Once you've made yourself familiar with the blogging community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse of conversations within your site's theme. Then, when you see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the other site a notification to let them know you cited them on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and often draws visitors to you.
Bloggers who use Trackback often enjoy greater control over
this function in their blogs than they do over linking, as they have the option to reject your reference - so there is a lesser incidence of fraudulent linking. That also gives your link a greater chance of being displayed.
So why don't more people use Trackback?
One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free blog system, Blogger, doesn't have Trackback. However, Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service ? it's a cut and paste away.
Many new bloggers don't get what it is and how it differs from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a little more complex than I've stated. But learn to use Trackback properly, and you won't need to beg for links to your site ever again.
It's harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to your site three times a week, by the end of the year you'd have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are more valued by search engines than a typical link trade with an unrelated site.
The most overlooked source of traffic for a blog is through article submission. To start with, turn your longer posts into articles and submitting them to ezines or directories. Look especially for directories that ask for the direct link to the article on your own site, and input the permanent link to the post on your blog.
Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers.
It's a shame this is the one of the least used traffic methods for most sites, let alone for blogs. In four days, this method generated just over 1000 visitors. 157 newsletter leads, 98 new feed subscribers, and 206 links to my site. You may not get these same results right away, but using these simple strategies can still get you more exposure than you have now.
These aren't normally the highest quality links, as they rarely make sure of anchor text. However, bloggers are citing me using Trackback, sometimes in lieu of linking to the site where they originally found the article.
To see this in action, do a search on "Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings", the title of an article I submitted earlier this week.
That article was published within a week of this one- the results speak for themselves. Many of these sites aren't the ones where my articles are normally published.
There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can leverage the content in your blog or RSS feed to increase the traffic to your site. The methods outlined here may be a bit outside the norm, but, as you'll soon find, that's part of the reason they are so effective.
What Are RSS Feeds?
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication." It's a format that
web sites and blogs can use to send updated headlines to you via
services like My Yahoo!. My Yahoo! gathers the content you
select from a variety of sources and displays it for you in one
convenient location. Syndication means you don't have to visit
each site individually to see what's new -- you simply scan
headlines or brief article summaries and click to read the full
text. That's the "really simple" part. And it's "really simple"
for publishers to make their content accessible this way too.
The Full Circle of RSS Marketing Power
RSS is a many-in-one marketing & publishing tool, although unfortunatelly most marketers still fail to understand this powerful concept.
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
Got Blog?
In 1999 I asked my friends and colleagues if they blogged. The responses I received ranged from odd looks to questions about the blogging practice. The end results of my findings was "Blog" was a new term and not highly recognized. That was then, a half million blog users ago.
Its Not Enough to Blog
A properly created weblog will do the following for your website: (a) add rich content; (b) add interactivity in the form of user ability to post comments; and (c) if properly set up, can automatically ping major search engines when new posts are made. This results in more frequent spidering of your website by the major search engines, with the fresh content being picked up quickly and increasing your site's ranking.
Using RSS Feeds to Set Off a Traffic Explosion
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is the perfect answer to your needs for sharing and distributing content. The way this works is webmasters can share bits of code with one another that give them access to the others forums, newsletters, blogs, information, news, and the like. When this information is shared, it can create a massive increase in traffic. Read the following suggestions regarding RSS feeds and increasing traffic for your website to decide if this is the right marketing tool for you.
Use Blogging to Manage Your Entire Web Sites Content
Blogging is a term that means different things to different people. To some people it means keeping an online journal. To others blogging is about creating a community of people who can contribute to a growing discussion on a specific topic. To me, however, blogging is about creating and running an entire web site. That's because blogging can actually be used as a complete content management system for almost any web site.
Make Money with Your Own Blog
Well, basically, setting up a blog means that you are creating a little space of your own on the Internet where you can make posts about anything that interests you. Of course, if you are going to be blogging on a variety of topics, the best way to make money with it would be to have different blogs for different topics otherwise your blog will be just one big jumbled mess that nobody would want to read about.
Blog Problems
What in the world is up with the world of blogs? Blogs are meant to be this great new technology where people can share their ideas and interests with others around the globe. As far as I'm concerned the state of blogs is one of chaos, confusion, and anti-interactivity. The other day I decided to do some research on the Web and try to connect to some blog writers out there that interested me. Let me tell you it was not an enjoyable task as I had envisioned. I spent four painful hours surfing through around a thousand on-line journals, and I found only a few that interested me. What are we doing out there people?
First of all, just getting to a blog can be a pain in the arse. For example, you type in the words 'Philosophy blogs' and a whole bunch of sites come up. Some are conglomerate sites with thousands of journals, but the area you're searching for may have only one blog in it! This is because they separate the blogs into a million different categories, like 'love', 'lovers', 'lovable' etc. Why not have just a few main categories to choose from?
The next problem is the content. People with 'philosophical' blogs are having personal chats with their mates about the local dance competition on Tuesday! Why not go to a chat room if you just want to talk to your friends? Blogs are supposed to be a personal viewpoint expressed to the whole Web community. Wouldn't you actually like to meet more people like yourself? How is this going to happen if you talk in strange uncommon slang and acronyms that you and your friends can only understand? Please stick to the subject at hand, and take it at least half seriously.
Another major problem is the fact that you can find a really cool blog that sparks an interest, but then find that the writer hasn't added an entry in over a year! What's it doing on the Net? Have these people passed away? I seriously doubt it, as there are so many blogs in this 'lost' state. Having a blog is a responsibility; it's a shared diary for the whole community. How can someone form a relationship if you only write in your blog once a millennium?
Back to the subject of content: These on-line journals are a real chance to communicate regularly with others with similar views to yourself. We can learn a lot from each other, as each human is an individual with special traits and skills that only they have. So why do we see so many blogs just talking about trivial nonsense like 'Who the coolest movie actor is.' Humanity is an intelligent species evolving everyday towards a higher consciousness. So where are all the thinkers out there, the people who have taken us to the next levels of spirituality and scientific exploration? I'd really like to hear what you've got to say, but all I can find are philosophical beliefs on why died pink jeans express one's true inner self.
The issue of making comments on someone's blog is also a controversial one. Why have comments sections if you're not going to reply to people who have expressed an interest in what you've had to say? How is this community going to function if all the conversation is one-way! Come on people, wake up and smell the onions! Let's change the blogging community into the awesome structure of shared knowledge that it was intended for. Please don't let it turn into the small-talk world of chat rooms.
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