What is RSS

So, What is RSS ?

RSS means Really Simple Syndication

You may have heard a lot of good things about RSS feeds ang blogs, and that starting one was a very good idea for traffic, return visitors and alike. With Yahoo starting a new RSS directory, we thought that it was more than time to get our feeds into action.

What is an RSS feed
How do you setup RSS
How do you get subsrcibers
How to submit your RSS feed.
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Firstly we had to figure out what is RSS and what a feed was exactly, most of the pages I found about RSS left me more confused than anything else. But, eventually it clicked, and I understood what an RSS feed is.

Then I set about finding out how you create one. I found the XML specification, which looked rather daunting, then I searched for some free software, but what I found was quite complicated to setup and use, I'm not a programmer!

I thought what was needed was a simple piece of software that made making an RSS feed easy. Then a clear cut step by step guide of how to setup the feed, and make it work for you. So here we go, I couldn't find it so I decided to make it myself! I've put together a piece of software that is easy to setup and use, and makes the RSS feed(s) for you, and this guide tells you how to put it all together.

So what is an RSS feed?

An RSS feed is very much like a bulletin board. You post an article with a headline, and visitors can view and read through your articles. Often readers are encouraged to add comments to the articles.

What's special about RSS is that the articles are available as a feed. This means that the readers don't have to come to you to get the latest news, you send it to them (you don't actually send anything, though).

The feed is an XML version of your articles, which can be read using RSS readers. Basically visitors to your site that use an RSS reader can subscribe to your feed by adding your feeds XML file to their readers list. Then whenever you update your feed with a new article the reader automatically gets notified.

An RSS feed is also know as a Blog for those of you who have wondered what a Blog is. If this is still sounding a bit alien to you, download an RSS reader, I initially chose RSS reader (no reason why, just sounded straight forward) there is a good list of available readers here. Grab the URL from one of the feeds at the top right of this page, and you'll see how it works.

So what do you need to do to set one up?

Firstly you'll need to decide what it's going to be about, this has to be something related to your sites content if you want your feed to be useful.

Our main rss feed for this site is "equestrian-blog". Once you know what your articles are going to be about you want to get some easy to use software that'll do it for you. I now use SBI RSS-It, and the free Google RSS Reader software. It makes setting up an RSS feed or creating a blog for your site as simple as it's ever going to get, and it's included in the the SBi hosting package.

It creates a feed in RSS 1 and RSS 2, which should be more than enough to please most RSS readers. The SBi software provides a guide for setting & marketing your feed. Once you have your feed in place the next step will guide you through getting your RSS feed noticed and adding it to your site so that the search engines, and your browser knows it's there.

How do I get subscribers?

Now that you've got your feed you'll want to start signing up subscribers. The first steps for doing this are getting the feed links on your site.

Add your feed to your HTML page as a link tag in your head section. So between <head> and </head> at the top of your page add :-

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="NAME YOUR RSS FEED" href="http://www.YOUR-SITE.com/YOUR-RSS-FILE.xml">

This will let browsers and search engines know where to find your RSS feed(s). You should add one link for each feed you generate. This will also light up the RSS box in your browsers toolbar, which, when clicked will open a menu of your feeds on the toolbar.

Add RSS buttons for visitors to subscribe to your feed.

Add a standard graphic to your html pages and link these buttons direct to your RSS XML feed. Some standard graphics for this are:-

Add pre-set buttons for Yahoo Google and MSN so that yahoo, google and msn subsrcribers can add your feed directly to their home page.

Get yourself listed in the new Yahoo RSS directory. The yahoo guide is really helpful.

Submit your RSS feed :

Submit to all the RSS and Blog directories and search engines that you can find. We've included a small selection below to get you started. After you've done these just use your browser to search for more.

http://www.feedburner.com/

FeedBurner offers the biggest, baddest advertising network for blogs and RSS feeds you'll find anywhere on the planet. We’ll put your advertising message in front of an impressive online audience spanning the world’s most recognized media publishers (e.g. Wall Street Journal Online, Wired News, Ziff Davis), A-list bloggers and blog networks and individual publishers from around the world.

http://www.myblog2u.com/

MyBlog2U is an RSS feed directory featuring more than 2000 different weblogs, divided in 15 main category, which are themselves divided in other sub-categories. Blogs can be also searched, through the search bar on the bottom of the page. With a simple registration you can submit your own feed for free, as long as it respects the MyBlog2U policies, here listed. The fields you have to fill after you register are blog category, URL, title, and short description.

http://www.bloglisting.net/

Blog Listing is a free weblog directory where anyone can submit her feed. Available in both paid and free version, you can have your blog listed in the featured links section by paying $8/year, or simple select the free version to get in the regular links section. To add your own blog you just have to provide the title, URL, description, your name and email, and select an appropriate category. Submitted blogs can then be browsed by category, latest added and top hits.

http://feedfury.com/

FeedFury is a place on the internet where you can submit your RSS feeds, manage them, and also browse other people's feeds, and search through them. It features more than nine thousand feeds, divided in 52 categories, and which produce more than six million pages. FeedFury allows you also to post your personal RSS feeds: you can post your feed by deciding a category and pasting the feed's URL or you can register to FeedFury and get your own "My Feeds" page where you can browse and edit your feeds.

The site also has a Top 100 section both for the single entries, and the whole feeds, basing on the views a single item has.

http://www.rssmicro.com/

RSS Micro is an online RSS feed search engine with more than 65 million feeds, blog posts, and news articles that you can browse and search into. Browsing between the feeds is really simple as you just have to pick between categories and sub-categories to find what you are looking for. Else, if you want to search for something manually, you can look for any word and decide whether to search into the feeds, the articles, or the news, and sort the results by ranking or date-added.

To post your feed, you just have to click the "Submit feed button" from the home page, and provide your name, email address (optional), and URL feed. The RSS Micro's team will then review your submission and decide whether to include your feed or not. No registration is needed.

http://www.blog-search.com/

Blog Search is an RSS feeds search engine featuring more than 10000 blogs, and growing every day. You can search for specific keywords or browse the blog categories to find what you are looking for.

To add your blog, you just need to register for a free account, providing you name and email address, and you can start adding all of your blog feeds from the "Blog Submission" page. Then you will be asked for the blog's URL, title, description, keywords, and category. Finally, click the "Add Blog Site" button and you're done.

To submit your feed to Blog Search, just register, click "Blog Submission" and follow the instructions. You can add multiple blogs with one account and edit them in the future.

http://itsmynews.com/

ItsMyNews provides a personalized online content for news and online news community. Select from 50,000 media sources - newspapers, magazines, blogs, TV and radio, and more - to build your ItsMyNews page, which automatically updates on a regular basis. ItsMyNews collects news in text, photo, sound, and video format.

You don't have to register, but you need to register if you want to personalize your news and access your personalized page from anywhere. The easiest way to get start is to click "Add Content to this tab" or "Add a tab" and choose the news you want. You can move boxes, collect news on personalized, rate stories, leave comments, and more.

To read a story, click the headline. If you need further help, take a look at the Frequently Asked Questions by clicking "User Guide" since there isn't a direct link to the guide. You can also enter your zip code for personalized local news and weather reports. You can move and change the columns, boxes and layout. If you want email alerts, the feature is also available.

To submit your feed to ItsMyNews, click "Add Content to This Tab" and select "Add Your Own" from the submenu. Add your URL feed or import your OPML file.

http://www.millionrss.com/

The MillionRSS project aims to promote general RSS promotion of feeds to the masses, to provide a place to browse feeds for popular categories of sites, to help out the little guys (and big guys too) - this is all about the long tail, to provide a single page for any blog or RSS feed out there with another home on the web to promote their content for free and to provide Link Love.

MillionRSS today provides includes a description, an image and a collection of post titles for each blog. Clicking post titles to go to the original website to access the content gathered in the feed. The site provides a wealth of content, and whether you are looking for web feeds for professional or personal reasons, you will find plenty of relevant blog posts in your area of interest.

After selecting a category, you browse content based on popularity, as voted for by other site visitors. You can instantly subscribe to any that take your interest by clicking on a large blue RSS icon. This will open the feed in a new window, so you can subscribe with a click.

If you enjoy a feed and want to promote its ranking, click the Digg-like 'Bump it!' button to add one to the current score of the feed. This applies within each separate category, as well as the 'all categories' section on the MillionRSS homepage.

Remeber to keep your feed updated, and don't fill it full of commercial promotions. Readers can unsubscribe to your feed at will, so to keep them you'll have to give them information that's interesting and not just a list of pages on your site.

That's it. I hope this guide has helped you understand What is RSS.

If you'd like to give something back then please link back to localriding.com using the code below, or support our sponsors by using the ads offered on this site.

It would also be nice if you subscribed to one or two of our RSS feeds :-

Equestrian Blog - The RSS feed for this site.
Events Diary - Full calendar of equestrian events and competitions

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