Quick Question About Adding RSS! PLEASE HELP!

[Blake Sloan]

I have read and read about the RSS afeeds and how they work, and have looked at all the topics and reply below. I understand how the <rss> coding works.. how it is set up for 2.0 etc... but I am lost in how to get it to the web page. As far as using an aggregator/reader etc... I am pretty familiar with web design, and am using dream weaver. I know what feeds I want to use, and have the rss codes.. I just need to know how to get them on my page. And I definately dont want to have to buy a newsreader for the page if it isnt needed, or use one with all kinds of advertisements on it....
Also I want the search engines to be able to read the content... Some one PLEASE help!!

Blake

[jcopley]

It's a little unclear to me what you are asking. Do you provide content that you want to appear on a web page, and in a RSS feed? Or do you want to be able to syndicate content from an existing feed an incorporate it into your site?

We do a little of both on oldhouses.com. This page:

http://www.oldhouses.com/listings.xml

is an RSS feed that can be read by any reader. It is pure XML, but it links to an XSL style sheet that causes it to display as a page in a browser.

This page:

http://www.oldhouses.com/old-house-r...on-stories.htm

syndicates content from an existing RSS feed using Javascript and presents it on the page. We found an external script somewhere but you could roll your own using AJAX techniques.

Server-side apps like Cold Fusion can also grab RSS feed data and render it into an ordinary web page, so that's another option for generating searchable syndicated content.

We have just started working with RSS so I can't really tell you it affects rankings. The second page doesn't actually include the syndicated content, so I doubt that it impacts the rankings for the page.

Since XML tends to have a good ratio of content to code, my guess is that search engines will be able to spider and rank them effectively and in some cases are already doing so.

Joe

[oceanmajk]

Step 1) Stop using dreamweaver
Step 2) Learn to code in PHP or ASP (booo) or even Ruby on Rails (though that might be a rough transition from dreamweaver)
Step 3) Do a google search for xml or rss "parsers" not "readers"... there's a ton of free scripts out there that will parse an xml feed into an array and you just output the array keys/values and format them anyway you want


Search engines will see the rss feeds on your site, and some of them might even count it as some quality content, but I'm not exactly sure about the effects of the outbound links to engines like how google uses them for PR rankings. I would guess they can determine if common link/link text combos are rss feeds or advertisements and don't credit them as anytyhing towards you PR. BUT - if you want to add relative content to your site, RSS is a good way to do it if you don't mind having your visitors leave your site on every click.

[jammybiskit]

We have a new site and we started a couple of RSS feeds a month or two ago with a link at the bottom of each page to allow users to hook up to them. We see them as a modern alternative to opt-in email subscriber lists.

Search engines seem to spider them. Our main RSS feed has a higher Google PR than our main site page!

RSS is an XML based technology not in itself suitable for pretty display on a browser. You can add a stylesheet in a similar way to HTML and CSS. We used an XSL stylesheet in our example. Be warned - XSL is pretty impenetrable "write-only code".

I don't know if you've read this article
http://searchenginewatch.com/serepor...le.php/2175271
but it might help.

There are plenty of free RSS readers (we have some pointers on our site at http://www.artsanddesigns.com/cgi-bi...dInfo.fragment). As well as the ones there, we installed Sage (http://sage.mozdev.org/) which is a sidebar for Firefox and seems to work well.

Let me know if you wanta copy of our XSL stylesheet.

[se-survivor]

Step 1: Keep your Dreamweaver!

If you're like me you're sick of seeing the non-designer types produce their sanitized butt-ugly CSS pages. There's no conversion in ugly design work. You'll see them all over the place with their sterile attempts to suck cash out of the Google adsense program because they can't make sales.

To answer your question:

How To Create A RSS Feed From Any Web Page
http://tinyurl.com/z43fg

Enjoy!