All Posts Tagged With: "rss"
How To Get An RSS Feed
This question was asked in a comment the other day. I wasn’t sure of the context of the question and whether the commenter was asking how to get an rss feed from another site or how to add a feed to his own site. So here’s a quickie on how to add a feed to Wordpress.
How to add a feed to Wordpress
Install Wordpress. Ok, done.
Seriously, that’s it. This functionality is already in Wordpress but there are some ways to enhance it. I like Feedburner so I use their service to manage my feeds. Their stats are nice and since the Pro version is now free I’m enjoying it even more. To get Feedburner feeds on your site all you have to do is go to feedburner.com and register an account then “burn a feed” from your current Wordpress feed url.
Your wordpress feed url will be something like: http://www.realitywired.com/feed
Once you’ve done that, you can add any number of widgets to publicize your feed and allow your readers to subscribe to your feed.
I also use a plugin titled: Feedburner Feedsmith that redirects all other Wordpress rss links to your Feedburner feed. This is handy because it allows you to detect all the different ways people are subscribing to your feed.
Lorelle has a huge list of additional Wordpress plugins designed to enhance and/or manipulate your feed.
Something to consider. Some versions of Wordpress create summary posts in your feeds and if you happen to use the <!– more –> tag you’ll also get summary posts. There is some debate over whether that’s better than publishing a full rss feed. That decision is up to the blog owner but a nifty plugin that will force Wordpress to generate a full rss feed can be found here.
Google Buys Feedburner Moves Closer To Owning The Web
It’s been rumored for days and now confirmed by Techcrunch, Google has indeed bought the RSS Management company Feedburner for $100 million. That’s not bad for a company that started only about four years ago with $10 million in startup capital. The deal is an all cash deal and puts Google in a position to stake a sizable claim in the in RSS Advertising market.
What’s that mean for you an me? It means we should soon be seeing the ability to inject Adsense into our RSS feeds and Adwords advertisers will have another option for displaying their ads along with the search and content networks.
What Is RSS?
Does this ever sound like a silly question but in the space of 3 hours I’ve had two people ask what it was. So what is RSS or an RSS feed for that matter? In short, it’s a way to read what’s published on another site without actually going there. Then there is the long answer; any one of a number of file formats (usually XML) that are used to syndicate web content via such things as blogs or podcasts.
A user wishing to keep abreast of the goings on of a site (this site) for example, can simply subscribe to the newsfeed (click here). Using software called “feed readers” you can subscribe to our feed and then anytime we post new content your reader is automatically updated. The advantage is, you can use one view or one tool to keep up with many different sites at once.
Most sites publish only partial feeds, a summary or except that’s designed to get you to come to the site to continue reading while others publish full feeds, as we do here. The hope is that as your scanning through the feeds if you find something we’ve posted interesting you’ll visit the site to find more vs. teasing teasing you into coming.
RSS feeds come in various formats, you’ll hear terms like Atom, XML and podcasts. They’re all basically the same thing, the format is simple a specification that determines how the feed is formated so your news reader can break it down and display it to you in a human readable format.
There’s a big list of newsreaders you can choose from here or I recommend just using Google Reader, it’s free and does a really good job. Plus you don’t have to install anything but you will need to register an account, if you have Gmail your all set.
To subscribe to a sites feed, you simply look for their feed link.
CNN for example uses a combination of text links and image links using a standard orange feed icon located at the bottom of the page.
Blogs, like this one usually make them a little more noticable. Ours is at the top of the page on the right.
- The standardized icon, comes in various sizes.
- Feedburner is a service that aides sites in managing their feeds, works the same for you the reader.
RSS Feed - Others use just a standard text link that links to their feed.
If you want to try it out, click one of the three links just above, we’d certainly appreciate your interest in our site.
I hope this helps explain RSS a little more. I intentionally tried to stay basic with it, but if you really want the gory details visit the RSS section on Wikipedia or you can just read through the entire specification here.
