21 replies to this topic

[DJKay]

Hi,

While I have done SEO& SEM, I am working on a new site in which I want to install an RSS feed for a specific industry topic. I am not sure if this is the right place to post this, but here goes.

I have some questions:

1) What and how could it physically look? Is this specific to the rss? I want to put it into an area on the homepage. I would just want a general description of the rss and maybe one or two of the latest top postings. Ofcourse, it would need to be refreshing itself so new content would be put in all the time.

2) Anyone have any specific search engines or places on search engines where I could find an rss producing content--The content is related to education?


3) How would it generally look from the coding perspective?


4) Are there any challenges from a coding/technical perspective I should be aware of?

I hope these are not too basic newbie question for this section of the forum--My appologies if it is-- Thanks in advance,

DJKay

[Kev]

1) What and how could it physically look? Is this specific to the rss? I want to put it into an area on the homepage. I would just want a general description of the rss and maybe one or two of the latest top postings. Ofcourse, it would need to be refreshing itself so new content would be put in all the time

An RSS fed takes a strict structure but loose design. Basically, its just data so you can make it look however you want- the appearance will be determined by the HTML or CSS you use to style it.

In terms of it refreshing, remember once the data is processed it becomes static HTML so making it refresh will be difficult unless you either decide to refresh the page using scripting or a meta refresh or you decide to import the RSS feed into Flash and make it refresh via actionscript.

2) Anyone have any specific search engines or places on search engines where I could find an rss producing content--The content is related to education?

I don't know off hand but I can look.

3) How would it generally look from the coding perspective?

That entirely depends on what coding you choose to parse it. The structure off an RSS file looks like this-

http://cyber.law.har...sampleRss20.xml

You would then use PHP, ASP, CGI, Flash or Javascript to turn that file into HTML

4) Are there any challenges from a coding/technical perspective I should be aware of?

What scripting languages are available to you?

[DJKay]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

Would be JavaScript. Do I have to refresh the whole page? Why not just the area its in on the site?

Best,

DJKay

[Jill]

Welcome DJKay!

There was a good article on this in my newsletter awhile back, which may be of use to you:

How to Get Your Web Site Content Syndicated

Hope this helps!

Jill

[niceguyeddie]

1) What and how could it physically look?  Is this specific to the rss?  I want to put it into an area on the homepage.  I would just want a general description of the rss and maybe one or two of the latest top postings.  Ofcourse, it would need to be refreshing itself so new content would be put in all the time.

Basically what you are looking to do with any feed, whether rss, atom, rdf, etc is to break the xml down to an array so you can process the raw data. If you want a description along with the title, etc, then look for RSS 2.0 feeds or Atom Feeds and go from there.

The refreshing is up to you. Most feeds give a timestamp to show how when they were last updated, and that should clue you in on when to grab the feed. It could be considered bad manners to grab a feed dynamically, so beware.

2) Anyone have any specific search engines or places on search engines where I could find an rss producing content--The content is related to education?

http://www.syndic8.com has a wide variety of feeds available for syndication. I would start there.

3) How would it generally look from the coding perspective?

Bare minimum, you need something to grab the feed, and then something to process the data. Once you have that, it's just a matter of working with the output. There are plenty of GPL solutions out there for this if you don't plan on writing your own.

4) Are there any challenges from a coding/technical  perspective I should be aware of?

As long as you are comfortable with processing XML it's not that big of a deal. Like I said though, there are plenty of solutions already written. I prefer Reverend Jim's Feed Parser, because it gives me the raw array and it's quick to work with for me.

[zestor]

Creating a RSS feed is generally a server side development effort. Your web server will generally serve the RSS feed.

It's nothing more than a XML response to a URL. Instead of the HTML you get with a web page, you get something a little different, you get XML that conforms to the RSS specification.

When you get your RSS feed up and running you can use a product like www.sharpdevelop.com to test it out. You can read the feed and display it.

RSS is cool because it allows you to point your RSS aggregator program at lots of RSS URLs (feeds) and be able to read all the content using a central interface without having to go to lots of sites to read it.

Generally RSS is popular with Blogs, but lots of others syndicate with RSS as well. Most recently I have seen RSS feeds appearing in Google News results, which I thought was pretty neat.

[zestor]

Here is RSS 2.0 spec with samples
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss

[Grumpus]

Bunches of Good RSS general info, some free RSS aggregators, and a small list of a few places that have RSS feeds dealing with web design related stuff. (I know that's not the specific type of feed you were looking for, but, the background info and feed readers may be of interest to you).
http://www.cre8asite...asp?category=27

G.

[DJKay]

Thanks soo much, I think I have almost convinced my principle to go for it.

Best,

DJKay

[qwerty]

Does anyone know of resources for finding RSS feeds you can add to a site? The info at cre8asite is great for webmaster/SEO stuff, but I'm looking for other subjects.

[Grumpus]

Most of the ones I'm aware of are pretty much garbage. There's very little data to base a search on, so you're pretty much stuck by browsing through a directory with feeds of all sorts of degree of quality and update frequency. Every time I've uses one of these places (syndic8.com is one - I think that's how you spell it) I end up spending an hour going through crap to maybe add one to my list.

The coolest thing going right now is Yahoo's news feed RSS stuff. I made a post about this at Cre8asite the other day, but it's so cool, I'm still giddy, so I may as well post it again for you guys.

I, like you, was on a quest for any kind of decent and fun RSS feed. I came across a blog that was describing Yahoo's new service. It's an rss feed of yahoo news that's broken down by category. In several categories, you can get fairly specific. Fun stuff, fine and dandy.

But, the blog entry went on to describe a little as-yet-to-be documented feature of Yahoo News RSS. It's a means of generating a custom feed based upon just about anything. I said to myself, "No way!" and I plugged in a keyword and with a single click I had generated a custom feed that let me know that Farscape is back in action!!! (that link's to the feed I generated - in HTML format...) What could be better than this???

I played around a bit more with the Yahoo Custom RSS Feed Generator and found created many more equally satisfying feeds. It takes some work to key on the right word or phrase to trigger the results you're looking for, but even some poorly chosen words and terms gave me some pretty satisfying results. All current, all covering a complete range of topics, and coming in from all the hundreds of recognized news sources that you find in Yahoo news every day.

Again, this doesn't help you with your quest for finding some decent feeds specifically devoted to your interest, but it's pretty spankin' cool, regardless.

G.

[torka]

G

That is most excellent.

Oh, hell. Now I'm going to have to knuckle down and figure out this RSS stuff so I can do something cool with this new toy. As though I've got nothing else to do and all the time in the world to do it in... <_<

Thanks, I think...

--Torka

[qwerty]

Very cool, Grumpus. But how are they going to pick up where they left off if Aerin and Crighton are dead??

Oh, and the RSS stuff. That's cool too.

[Grumpus]

Download opera and the newest beta version has an RSS reader built right into the e-mail part of it.

Or, you can go to my.Yahoo.com and create an account. You can sign up for ANY RSS feed and then that'll show up on your Yahoo Start Page when you go there. Interestingly, I was playing with that the other day and it said I could enter in keywords to find feeds. So I started with cre8asite and it knew the link to our forums feed. I then tried "HighRankings" as a keyword and it knew this one, too. After some more reading, I discovered that if someone adds a feed to their My Yahoo page, Yahoo then learns about the feed and it gets added to their "feed database" (that one, day, will become a listing of RSS feeds that Qwerty is looking for - it's still in Beta though and apparently their directory, at this point, is just as crappy as the ones I described in my earlier post, so you don't have access to it, yet). Anyway, that means that at least one person from here has added the HighRankings feed to their Y! page before me.

As far as being able to display feeds on your own site - I know that there's at least one listed in the "Agregators" section of the RSS part of our directory (link to that is earlier in this thread, also). If I remember properly, it's a PHP based one, so it should work pretty much everywhere. It did, from memory, look a bit confusing to set up, though...

Most blog software and CMS systems like phpWebsite also have an easy way of displaying feeds on your site. Might look into something along those lines just for that feature of it.

----

Here's another fun thing I learned this week - for those of you who have websites that have RSS feeds. Go into your logs. Places like Yahoo that deliver RSS feeds (or blog feed type sites like weblogs.com) end up polling your feed on a regular basis and cache it so that it's not hammering your server every two second because someone else wants to view your feed. When those polls come in, it'll leave a user agent ID in your logs. Yahoo's for example, looks like this:

YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0;
MSIE 5.5; http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html; users 236; views
36994)

(This is from the same blog I linked to that has the Custom Feed Generator on it).

If you look at it, you'll see that the user agent in your log tells you how many different Yahoo users have your site "subscribed" on their My Yahoo Page. And it also tells you how many times your feed has been viewed by yahoo. (Most of the other feed crawler agents I saw didn't have the views field, but they did have the users field).

So, I Jill or Scottie or whomever goes and checks the logs and finds the YahooFeedSeeker user agent, the most recent hit by them will show how many people subscribe to the feed. Pretty nifty, huh?

G.

[qwerty]

One piece of bad news at Yahoo's RSS page:

The feeds are provided free of charge for use by individuals and non-profit organizations for personal, non-commercial uses. We ask that you provide attribution to Yahoo! News in connection with your use of the feeds.

(Emphasis added)

My client is commercial.