Become An RSS Master

What Is RSS?

RSS is my favourite internet technology. It’s all about me – my own personalised and condensed version of the internet, giving me what I want as quickly as possible. Whenever I’m online, I keep my iGoogle page open. I love RSS feeds because I can check up on 20 SEO-related blogs, the New York Times headlines, the Sydney Morning Herald headlines, the weather report, my gmail inbox, tech blog updates, and daily recipes involving camembert cheese all in the same browser window.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and that is exactly what it is – syndication a goat could follow. Instead of clicking through your favourite websites one by one each day to check if they have been updated through your browser bookmarks like it’s 1998, with an RSS feed reader you can view within one browser window all the latest headlines at once.

iGoogle isn’t the only way to read RSS feeds, you can incorporate some readers into your browser so a dropdown menu of the latest headlines appears when you click, or use a downloadable software like rssreader.com.

With RSS, net time is significantly cut down for customers. Given that people already scan copy with less patience and absorption online than they do from a newspaper, you need to have a feed to get your information across as directly as possible. If your clients are using RSS and your site isn’t on there, do you think they’ll be looking up your site to check for updates that might interest them every day? The web-triumverate of three major internet companies Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are all rapidly integrating RSS functionality, which is a pretty good recommendation that this is a band wagon you need to be getting on.

To your business, an RSS feed is a very simple (and free!) online marketing tool. You can even get readers to come to you easily by being indexed on a feed directory. Once you have a feed online, you can submit the feed to various sites that act as indexers (a good list is here: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm) where people search for topics they have interest in.

How Does It Work?

Your website will need an RSS feed for your readers to view the site in the format, which uses a language called xml (similar to html, but much easier!).

There is software available to create an RSS feed, like FeedForAll, into which you enter your xml code.

How Do I Create RSS?

The parts that make up an RSS feed are referred to as ‘items’. Each item contains a title, description and link. The title and description describe the content of a page, and the link connects to that page. Like html, open and close tags <> and slashes / are used. This is an example of an RSS item:

<item>
<title>Title</title>
<description>Description</description>
<link>http://www.link.com</link>
</item>

An RSS feed is a series of items one after the other, making up a ‘channel’. This is an example of a channel:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">

<channel>
<title>Channel Title</title>
<description>The explanation of how the items are related goes here</description>
<link>http://www.directoryoflinks.com</link>

<item>
<title>Title</title>
<description>Description</description>
<link>http://www.link.com</link>
</item>

<item>
<title>Title</title>
<description>Description</description>
<link>http://www.link.com</link>
</item>

</channel>

</rss>

Your chosen software will then show you how to publish the RSS feed online.

TIP: Be sure to save files in .xml format!