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Blogging, RSS & Feeds
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.
Top 10 Reasons to Start Blogging
"What's blogging?" you ask.
#1 Mistake Most Blogs Do
As much as this might surprise most bloggers, the #1 mistake most blogs are doing is not publishing their content via e-mail, as a supplement to their RSS feeds.
Business: Deliver Information Safely
Businesses that are not using feeds today, as part of their marketing and advertising plans, will soon do so, or should thinking of implementing them soon. Although this is a fairly new communications tool it is growing rapidly. The reason is that the information gatherer, consumers, etc., are or will be using readers to view information. The main reason is that information can be viewed with No Spam, No Junk Mail and No Viruses threats.
How Direct Sales Reps Can Use Blogging
One of the tools that a smart direct sales representative use to attract new business is a blog. A blog keeps customers and potential customers informed about products, events and services that relate to your business, new releases, contests, specials and it always keeps your name front and center. It shows readers that you are a good source of information that they can count on.
What is Blogging?
Blogs have been around for many years but have recently become somewhat a new ?craze?. A Blog is short for Web Log is basically an online journal. They can be set up at little to no cost at all, and can be used for a wide variety of things. Some bloggers just blog for the fun of it, while others tend to use their blogs for business reasons.
RSS Explained
What is RSS? To begin with, it's one of those things everyone says is easy to understand. And it is, as soon as you have your own 'ah-ha' moment.
Feeds For Small Business: Real World Examples
A merchant I was talking to the other day asked to me, "Aren't feeds for bigger companies with IT people on staff?" All they knew about feeds was that bigger companies , news providers etc., were using them. After I explained how that particular merchant could use a feed for her business, she were quite excited about the prospect of doing just that.
Snob-Bloggers: You Just Might Be A Snob If You Publish A Blog
You Might Be A Snob-Blogger If?
RSS Round-Up: Whats Happening with Simple Syndication?
Have you been following the explosion of RSS -- Really Simple Syndication -- activity online? Seems this new method of "getting the word out" is picking up steam. Why? Partly because of the Davids, and partly because of the Goliaths. The "Davids" -- the little guys -- are able to deploy the technology since it is easy to use and usually is a feature of Blogging software (Blogging is another emerging trend -- for more articles on Blogging, visit WebFadds.com). You just click the option and send your RSS feed (broadcast your articles) out to subscribing sites. And the "Goliaths", the likes of Yahoo, Google, MSN and others, are all catering to it in various ways. Let's look at some of the latest ways this is playing out...
3 Tips to improve your RSS marketing
3 Tips to improve your RSS marketingYou have created an RSS feed, or maybe you have several feeds and you post at least once a week to keep your RSS subscribers interested. So now you can sit back and watch your hit counter tally up all those extra visitors. Well you may think you have finished but there are a few things you can do to improve things still further.1. Let browsers and search engines know you have an RSS available.To do this you need to add a line of HTML to every page that has a link to your RSS feed. The link will be:link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="title" href="http://www.site.com/rss.xml"This line will need to be enclosed by angled brackets and placed between your HEAD tags of your page. Once you have done this some search engine bots and web browsers such as Firefox will know you have an RSS feed available.2. Submit your RSS feed to the RSS and Blog directories.Like you would submit your site to search engines you can submit your site to RSS specific directories. This will give your RSS greater exposure to an audience that is already interested and educated about the benefits of RSS. This is a list of Alexa ranked RSS directories and another can be found here.3. Announce that your RSS feed has been updated.Every time you add a new item to your RSS feed you can announce it to the world, or at least many of the RSS directories. To do this you need to ping each service. If you are using Blogging software your software is probably already doing this for you , check your documentation.For those of you who do not have software set up to automatically ping for you there is no need to worry. There is a free service at Ping-o-matic that will do this for you.
Update Your Websites Content Automatically 24/7 Using RSS(Real Simple Syndication) and RSS Feeds
RSS(Real Simple Syndication) is the newest form of content syndication to hit the Internet and is widely becoming the best known way online to deliver fresh targeted content to your website(s) to whatever audience you're targeting 24/7/365.
RSS Feeds Have Revolutionized the Internet
RSS feeds have revolutionized the Internet for one very good reason: they have provided and end to Spam. With RSS feeds, you can say good-bye to mass emails and distributions that do not meet your news needs and clog up your mailbox and hard drive.
Blogs and Networking
In the middle 1990?s everyone started talking about needing a website. Now, the new ?must have? is a web log or blog. While blogs can come in all shapes and sizes, a blog is just a very simple way to publish a journal, record of events, thoughts, ideas or whatever the author wants to write about. A blog sits on a website ? whether that site is run by you or managed by a company that will ?host? your blog.
How To Add Random RSS Content To Your Site
Most savvy internet marketers will know how important it is to have fresh content added to their sites on a daily basis but the problem sometimes is to find the time and/or content. Adding an RSS feed is a good way to add fresh content to a site, but the problem again is that most of them only get updated on a weekly basis.
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