Answering No.1 The Question About RSS - Why Should I Care?

Written by Andrew Henry


Continued from page 1

C) Creating your own feed can start to get intorepparttar realms of techie so I'll be careful what I say here. The basic principle is simple in thatrepparttar 131650 XML (Extensible Markup Language) format whichrepparttar 131651 resulting feed/channel will be in is still at heart, just a text file. You don't have to start from scratch when creating your own feed and you can use a simple template which fitsrepparttar 131652 file format for RSS feeds (this format has an open license so you can just use it and insert your own data).

You will find links to more in-depth tutorials at www.pheedcentral.com as I complete them.

The other alternative is to use an external RSS host that will serve your feeds/channels up for you, all you do is submit your feed and then keep it updated.

If you decide to create your feed yourself, it's a good idea to getrepparttar 131653 code validated to ensure that anyone trying to read your feed won't run into problems. This can be done easily and quickly using a validation service like those available from sites such as Userland (www.aggregator.userland.com/validator ) and Archive.org (www.feeds.archive.org/validator )

5) Publishing Your RSS Feed Ok, so now you know how to create your own feed and validate your file. The next thing you'll want to do is publish your feed to as many places as possible. Why as many as possible? Well it's a numbers game,repparttar 131654 Internet is a big place, so don't limit your information to onlyrepparttar 131655 first few feed sites you find (after all, you only need to keeprepparttar 131656 source information updated so it's not extra work after you maderepparttar 131657 submissions torepparttar 131658 sites that will show people your feed).

3 ofrepparttar 131659 most popular submission sites for your feed are:-

A more comprehensive list will be maintained at www.pheedcentral.com .

If you're just after a feed to add content to your own site, repparttar 131660 3 listed above plus www.webreference.com/services/news will get you going.

To display someone else's feed on your site, a free script called RSS Fetcher can be obtained from www.mimanet.com/scripts/rss_fetcher.html

If you want to check your own feed or take a look at some other websites feed without any hassles at all, you can simply go to and select 'Add RSS Headlines' fromrepparttar 131661 options for what information is shown on your yahoo homepage. www.pheedcentral.com will contain video tutorials of several ofrepparttar 131662 processes described within this document (including usingrepparttar 131663 my.yahoo rss reader)

6) Promoting/Marketing Your Feed If you haven't already spotted them, there are several advantages to using RSS as part of your business marketing mix. Email marketing has become increasingly at risk of SPAM complaints and ISP email filters deleting legitimate business emails. The fact thatrepparttar 131664 'push' approach used by email (where you 'push'repparttar 131665 content at people) means that there's always a risk of someone forgetting that they asked for your information. At best it may just get deleted as it's received.

The big advantage of RSS is that everyone who reads your feed has had to select it manually and even though it's not subject torepparttar 131666 same restrictions as email,repparttar 131667 submission sites will do some vetting before it goes live (they're usually particularly interested inrepparttar 131668 frequency that it gets updated).

So, in short, you can be pretty sure that when someone reads your feed that they are interested in it. If you update it regularly, you can gain access to a readership that your normal marketing methods wouldn't have reached.

This is especially of interest to newsletter editors who regularly release their newsletter as it effectively publishesrepparttar 131669 content to a new audience and could even help improverepparttar 131670 search engine visibility ofrepparttar 131671 whole site if used effectively.

If you've been put off ofrepparttar 131672 idea of providing a feed because you think that people still seerepparttar 131673 ability to access RSS feeds as too 'techie', don't worry because as you'll see when you start to look around that it's rapidly becoming more widely adopted and will almost certainly be simply another function of web browsers. There are desktop versions ofrepparttar 131674 reader available and a few are listed at www.pheedcentral.com . You can find a browser that already supports RSS feeds, it's called Firefox (www.firefox.com )

If you are keen to makerepparttar 131675 most ofrepparttar 131676 search engine related benefits of RSS and you want an html version of your feed instead you can get a tool called CARP () which will convertrepparttar 131677 feed into html and give yourepparttar 131678 code to put on your site (this will then be updated as your content is).

There are other services that achieverepparttar 131679 same result; some are free, some not.

If you've seen some free JavaScript alternatives and are wondering why we've not mentioned them here, it's simply due torepparttar 131680 fact that Search Engine Robots can't index JavaScript so it's usually best to avoid it unless you have a specific reason to need to use it. If you're a marketer interested in tracking who reads your feeds then an excellent tool for this is FeedBurner

That should be more than enough information to get you started onrepparttar 131681 path to using RSS.

Overrepparttar 131682 coming weeks, I'll be creating tutorials on Blogging, RSS syndication, SSI and other content sharing topics so stay tuned to www.pheedcentral.com.

Andrew Henry



About the Author: Andrew Henry is an Internet Marketing Consultant involved in teaching small businesses how to effectively market online. Current Information Websites include www.pheedcentral.com, www.moneyandmotivation.com, and www.learn-seo.com.


PHP, my favorite Server-side Programming Technology!

Written by Muhammad Umair


Continued from page 1
PHP withrepparttar shortest learning curve, if you are already familiar with C / Java, you can start developing in PHP in just next 30 minutes! Its highly compatible runs on any 32 bit or better platform (UNIX / Linux / Windows) without changing a bit in your codes, *1 currently 16,946,328 Domains on 1,348,793 IPs (Servers) are using PHP! *2 Another statistics is that it is supported by more then 98% web servers! Php has remarkable Database support, PHP with MYSQL is really an awesome combination. PHPLIB is a set of libraries with most commonly required routines. If you are inspired of Object Oriented Paradigm, PHP has it for you, OOP support in PHP is sufficient enough for most web programming related tasks, plus their is nothing to worry forrepparttar 131648 programmers don't like to use OOP. The most major future of PHP that encourages web hosts to provide support for PHP on their servers is that its really very lite. For many simple tasks PHP running on P-133 with just 32 Mb RAM ran circles around ASP code on an NT machine having P500 with 600 Mb RAM! For more information, www.php.net can berepparttar 131649 best start.

*1 Stats for August 2004 from www.PHP.net *2 Missingrepparttar 131650 actual resource!

The Auther is Umair < hiUmair@yahoo.com > BS (Software Engineering) student in University of Karachi.


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