How to display RSS feeds on your website
How to display RSS feeds on your website
Welcome to this weeks slightly delayed newsletter. You will notice that I am publishing on a Friday rather than a Thursday, is this because of the snow that has caused chaos on the UK’s travel network? Not a chance, there hasn’t even been a dusting in sunny Yorkshire although the local weather assures me there is some heavy snow on the way overnight, I’ll believe it when I see it! Anyway, enough snow related ramblings let’s move onto this weeks newsletter.
In this edition I will be covering RSS feeds and how you can use these feeds to display automatically updated content on your website.
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication†but is it really that simple? Well judging by the amount of RSS related questions that I am asked I’d say there is still a lot of confusion around RSS feeds.
Put in simple terms websites can produce “Feeds†(also know as RSS feeds) from their website. These “feeds†are updated every time new content is posted to the site, which means that anyone subscribing to that feed receives new content every time the site is updated.
That’s all well and good but how can these feeds help your website? Well have you ever heard of the phrase “Unique content� Unique content is loved by the search engines, RSS feeds can be used to bring new content to your site on an hourly, daily r monthly basis.
You can display RSS feeds on just about every subject you can think of, more and more sites are giving users the option to subscribe to RSS feeds. Even this blog has an RSS feed – just click on the “RSS 2.0†link to your right. Here are just a few example feeds, I have listed the feed location and I am also displaying the Soccer feed on a seperate page; come back tomorrow and you will notice that the content has changed, remember all of this is done automatically!
– – Click here to view my page with the feeds included – –
News
http://news.google.com/?output=rss
Soccer
http://rss1.mediafed.com/feed/skysports/Football
Entertainment
http://syndication.digitalspy.co.uk/xmlcache/dsukstd.xml
Those are just a small selection of feeds taken from 3 websites; you can find RSS feeds on any subject you wish – just look out for the orange symbol as shown below.
Now you know what feeds are and how they work, how do you get them onto your website?
This is done using something called an “RSS to HTML Parser†and it is dead easy to do. All you need to do is enter the URL of the RSS feed and it will then display the latest news from that feed on your website.
Take a look at the site below, all of that site’s content is generated using RSS feeds! The owner just sit’s back and cashes her adsense cheque every month!
Leona Lewis website – Nothing to do with me 😉
The most popular parser is a script called “Weblines†but DON’T buy that (it costs around $30). My friend Jane Shread is releasing a new script sometime next week for only £12 (around $20), which does the same thing as Weblines but also allows you to format your feeds. I am actually using Jane’s script to display the sports feed above but you will have to wait until she has finished writing the instructions 😉
I will be dropping you an email about the script sometime next week. If you really can’t wait that long then feel free to go with Weblines, a search on Google will find it for you.
I will be using RSS feeds to display unique content on my new El Passo Books website that will be up sometime next week. As I said it’s a great way to add unique, self-updating content to your websites. It will save you a lot of time and the search engines will love you!
That’s it for this week’s newsletter; look out for the email with a link to the new RSS to HTML parser script.
Thanks for reading,
Regards,
Dan
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Hi Dan
I have used RSS in various web sites RSS as it can be useful for unique content which changes regularly and therefore making the sites more search engine friendly and helping to get them better ranked
Derek
I am not sure why the word unique is mentioned so often. Surely the content is not unique if it is coming from another site. Yes, it will be constantly updating on your own site, which is great to have fresh content, but it won’t be unique. It will only be unique if you are the only website that displays those articles.
I’m still in the dark about how to put RSS on my site. Where do I find RSS to put on the site? Then how does the parser work?
HI Don,
You can see which sites contain RSS feeds by looking for the orange RSS icon, or if using Internet Explorer 7 look to see when the Orange Icon becomes highlighted, that shows there is an RSS feed on that page.
The parser takes the XML “gobbledegook” and turns it into HTML so that it displays on your website.
I should have included a link to the parser shouldn’t I 🙂
http://www.ebooksmart.co.uk/easy-rss/salespage_dan.php
Anna Nicole Said,
February 10, 2007 @ 12:38 pm
I am not sure why the word unique is mentioned so often. Surely the content is not unique if it is coming from another site. Yes, it will be constantly updating on your own site, which is great to have fresh content, but it won’t be unique. It will only be unique if you are the only website that displays those articles.
I agree with what your saying up to a point but If you display a multiple of differant feeds then that feed becomes ‘unique’ surely!