How to use RSS correctlyWritten by Allan Burns
There is no doubt in my mind that RSS is here to stay. RSS is a simple and effective means of communicating your message to your visitors without invading their privacy or spamming them. It has many benefits over email and there have been many reports of death of email due to continual rise of mass spamming and non delivery due to spam filters. By no means is email dead, it is still best personal communication method besides picking up phone. It's just that RSS does some things much better than email. I have been informing and educating webmasters about RSS since I first discovered potential of this medium. A whole industry has now grown up around RSS and now there are directories that specialise in listing RSS feeds and tools to help you create RSS feeds. Everyone seems to be jumping on bandwagon and everybody seems to have their own opinions about how RSS should be used. Even Google has joined in to offer adsense in RSS feeds. The problem I see is that improper use of RSS may well send RSS way of email. Currently it seems that if you publish an RSS feed contents of that feed seem to be considered public domain. The reasons for this is, I believe, to do with way content is packaged in RSS, this makes content easy to syndicate. It is not that difficult to create a script or desktop application to strip out content of RSS feeds and publish them on someone else's website. There is even a few applications being sold for just this purpose.
| | Using Feedburner to add statistics to your RSS feedWritten by Allan Burns
Out of many of free RSS and blogging services that I have tried one of most useful has been Feedburner. Feedburner allows you to publish your RSS feed and provides circulation statistics about your RSS feed. It also allows you to make your feed more friendly by using Feedburners Smartfeed system and can also make your feed browser friendly. The most useful service provided by Feedburner are it's circulation statistics. These statistics are not only useful for yourself to see how popular your feed is but also to provide circulation statistics to potential advertisers. Feedburner can tell you which RSS readers are being used to read your feed, how many readers you have and which posts readers are clicking through back to your website. Feedburners Smartfeed system can supply most valid feed by detecting which RSS reader user is using. This irons out any potential compatibility problems there may be between your feed and readers feed reading software. If your visitor click on your RSS feed subscription link Feedburner will provide your visitor with a web friendly version of feed rather than an unformatted XML file. This is great for educating reader about RSS feeds. To use Feedburners services first you need to go to Feedburner and enter your feed link. Your feed link is address you give your readers to add your feed to their feed readers. Take a look at my RSS sign up page at Newsniche to get a better idea of how this works. Once you have your feed address enter it into text box on Feedburner page. Clicking on ok will bring up a page with all of options for your feed, you will need to decide for yourself which services you need. At bottom of page will be your new feed address which you will now offer to your readers instead of your original feed address. Follow rest of instructions to complete process and then you will have an improved feed with statistics.
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