C) Creating your own feed can start to get into realms of techie so I'll be careful what I say here. The basic principle is simple in that XML (Extensible Markup Language) format which 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 fits 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 get 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, Internet is a big place, so don't limit your information to only first few feed sites you find (after all, you only need to keep source information updated so it's not extra work after you made submissions to sites that will show people your feed).

3 of 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, 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' from options for what information is shown on your yahoo homepage. www.pheedcentral.com will contain video tutorials of several of processes described within this document (including using 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 that 'push' approach used by email (where you 'push' 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 to same restrictions as email, submission sites will do some vetting before it goes live (they're usually particularly interested in 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 publishes content to a new audience and could even help improve search engine visibility of whole site if used effectively.

If you've been put off of idea of providing a feed because you think that people still see 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 of 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 make most of 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 convert feed into html and give you code to put on your site (this will then be updated as your content is).

There are other services that achieve 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 to 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 on path to using RSS.

Over 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

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