RSS News Feed Creation & Syndication

If you are a web site owner or ezine publisher, you probably know what it’s like to slave for hours trying to put together quality content to keep your visitors or readers interested. In our case, it’s been almost five years of producing original content for this WebAdvantage.net newsletter. Recently, our bi-weekly articles have been picked up by Google News (thanks for the applause), which has not only encouraged us to keep writing, but has also interested us in doing more syndication of our content. If you are also interested in doing so, you’ll want to know about creating an RSS (Rich Site Summary) news feed for your site. RSS is an XML format used for sharing headlines, images, content, and links between different web sites. In the context of syndication, RSS is used to notify other sites of news stories that they can easily link to without having to manually program such information. Knowledge of HTML or XML is not required, just some simple copying and planning. For the benefit of our readers, we’re going to lay out the steps to implementing RSS now.

Steps to Creating an XML RSS News Feed

The first step is to create the heading for the page you want syndicated. This heading will include tags for title, description, main page link, language, and images (optional). Additional XML coding is used at the top and must be added to your XML page:

<?xml version=”1.0″ ?>

<rss version=”2.0″>

<channel>

<title>Your Site’s Title</title>

<description>Your Site’s Description</description>

<link>http://www.yoursite.com</link>

<language>en-us</language>

<<image>http://www.yoursite.com/image.jpg</image>

This is in XML Version 1.0 and RSS version 2.0. The language is set at “en-us”, U.S. English. For other language options, consult the Library of Congress’s XML Language Code Guide.

Now that we’ve defined the heading, it’s time to add news articles. In RSS XML, an article is defined as an item. Each item needs to include a title, description, link, and publication date tag.

Here is an example:

<item>

<title>Your Article’s Title</title>

<description>An overview of your article. You will want to add a 2 or 3 sentence summary here.</description>

<link>INSERT THE URL FOR YOUR ARTICLE HERE</link>

<pubDate>Thursday, 15 May 2003 15:05:00 PST</pubDate>

</item>

It is recommended to include 5 to 10 items/articles at a time, always updating your listings whenever something new is published on your site. At this point in time, we include seven items on our WebAdvantage.net feed.

Step 3: To complete your RSS feed, end with the following code:

</channel>

</rss>

Step 4: upload your feed as a .xml page and never as a .html or .htm page, or it simply will not work.

Once complete, your RSS feed should look something like our own feed. Below we display the RSS feed for our last article, “Will Anti-Spam Laws Ever Be Legislated?” If you use IE, you can also view our feed at http://www.webadvantage.net/rss.xml (Netscape will not show the XML tags; only a text version of the feed).

<?xml version=”1.0″ ?>

<rss version=”2.0″>

<channel>

<title>WebAdvantage.net Internet Marketing and Online Advertising</title>

<description>Internet marketing, search engine ranking and advertising specialists. WebAdvantage.net eMarketing Tips are published on a regular basis.</description>

<language>en-us</language> <link>http://www.webadvantage.net</link>

<image>http://www.webadvantage.net/portfolio/wadvlc.jpg</image>

<item>

<title>Will Anti-Spam Laws Ever Be Legislated?</title>

<description>An overview of the Washington, DC FTC Spam Conference, Spam Blacklisting, and Legislation in Congress on dealing with Spam.</description>

<link>http://tinyurl.com/bvg4</link>

<pubDate>Thursday, 22 May 2003 15:05:00 PST</pubDate>

</item>

</channel>

</rss>

In one of our link tags you’ll see a url, http://tinyurl.com/bvg4. We use TinyUrl because our dynamic Cold Fusion (.cfm) links are not supported by XML. This is a common problem with dynamic page(though not with static .htm/.html pages), so if your links are not supported we suggest consulting an XML programming guide or using a service like TinyUrl.com. TinyUrl, and others like them, can also come in handy when you have a big, long url that you want to send in a text-only message as a way to condense it.

Testing Your Feed

Ok, so you’ve loaded your RSS XML page and and you are receiving no errors when viewing the page in your browser. Excellent! Now, for an example of how your news feed looks when it’s been picked up, let’s test it!

The Wytheville Community College web page hosts a testing and publishing service at where you can input your feed URL and then see the results.

To preview the WebAdvantage.net RSS Newsfeed on the WCC site click here

You will see that the newsfeed code is transformed into a easy to read page of news headlines and descriptions. This is how a basic RSS News Aggregator or Syndicator will publish your news feed.

Syndication of Your Feed

Although an easier way to distribute your content, RSS Feeds are no magic answer to getting your work published, nor is your material going to automatically be added to major news sites. This will take some time and work, but if accomplished, it will pay off in the long run.

The first and easiest places you should submit your feed to are RSS and Blog Search Engines. These may not drive significant traffic now, but neither did Google four years ago! Click here for a list of RSS and Blog Search Engine links to submit to.

News Aggregators are downloads or web based programs used by people to choose the news they want to read. A person can search for terms (much like search engines) or subscribe to categories of news (like “Marketing & Advertising”). Here are some submittal pages for these tools.

News Syndicators services may be harder to get your feed included in (dependent upon the newsworthiness of your content). Such services range from small syndicatiors, to widely published ones such as Moreover. View a list of New Syndicator links.

RELATED WEBADVANTAGE.NET ARTICLES

Blogging– Funny Name, Great for Online Marketing
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