Saturday, November 14, 2009

Can I make my RSS feeds look like they are a regular page on my html site even thought they are xml files?

I've been reading through information on RSS but I still don't understand it. What I get is that I need something like Feedforall to build my feed and should use something like FeedBurner to distribute it right???





OK, so once I build an RSS and someone subscribes to it, and when they see a feed that interests them and they click on it, does it take them to a xml page on my site that looks like the rest of my html site (ie, with the top banner, side menu, etc)? or does it take them to a plain looking page with just the Feed information that I created in Feedforall?





I get that people can read the RSS in their feed aggregator (feedreader)... So what do I do to get people to visit my site, do I put a link in the Feed that brings them to my site if they want to visit after reading the full feed in their aggregator, or do they automatically come to a page on my site by clicking on the title of my RSS feed as in gmail webclips?

Can I make my RSS feeds look like they are a regular page on my html site even thought they are xml files?
The XML is not meant for reading. Your visitors copy the URL and put the it into their news readers. To get people there you have to advertise. There are many ways to do that. Here is a start:





In WordPress, add these links in the Options-%26gt;Writing-%26gt;Update Services box:


http://api.feedster.com/ping.php


http://api.moreover.com/ping


http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2


http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping


http://bblog.com/ping.php


http://bitacoras.net/ping/


http://blogsearch.google.com/ping


http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc


http://coreblog.org/ping/


http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc


http://ping.feedburner.com


http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php


http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php


http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php


http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2


http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/


http://rpc.newsgator.com/


http://rpc.pingomatic.com


http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping


http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2


http://topicexchange.com/RPC2


http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b


http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php


http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblog...


http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?...


http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php


http://www.blogsnow.com/ping


http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php


http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/


http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/





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1) http://www.EzineArticles.com


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Reply:Yes, you can link to your website using your RSS feed. There are some standard tags, or 'elements', that are used in the RSS specification, and one of them is the %26lt;link%26gt; tag. So a typical RSS feed might look like this:





%26lt;rss version="2.0"%26gt;





%26lt;channel%26gt;





%26lt;title%26gt;RSS Title Goes Here%26lt;/title%26gt;


%26lt;description%26gt;RSS Feed Description Goes Here%26lt;/description%26gt;


%26lt;link%26gt;%26lt;/link%26gt;http://www.yourwebsite.com%26lt;/link%26gt;





%26lt;item%26gt;


%26lt;title%26gt;Article 1%26lt;/title%26gt;


%26lt;description%26gt;A snippet of your article goes here%26lt;/description%26gt;


%26lt;link%26gt;http://www.yourwebsite.com/article1.html %26lt;/link%26gt;


%26lt;/item%26gt;


%26lt;item%26gt;


%26lt;title%26gt;Article 2%26lt;/title%26gt;


%26lt;description%26gt;A snippet of your article goes here%26lt;/description%26gt;


%26lt;link%26gt;http://www.yourwebsite.com/article2.html %26lt;/link%26gt;


%26lt;/item%26gt;


%26lt;item%26gt;


%26lt;title%26gt;Article 3%26lt;/title%26gt;


%26lt;description%26gt;A snippet of your article goes here%26lt;/description%26gt;


%26lt;link%26gt;http://www.yourwebsite.com/article3.html %26lt;/link%26gt;


%26lt;/item%26gt;





%26lt;/channel%26gt;


%26lt;/rss%26gt;





Now there are two %26lt;link%26gt; tags. One is a general link (usually linking to your homepage) and the other %26lt;link%26gt; tags are links to each of the articles in your RSS feed.





As for how the RSS feed is displayed, well that depends on what you're viewing it in. Firefox, for example, will just show the bog standard information of the feed. It will also apply the %26lt;link%26gt; tags of each article to the title of the article, essentially turning the title into a link that takes the user to the full article.





You can display an RSS feed as a webpage on your website by using a technology called XSLT. What this does is takes the RSS file (or any other XML file) and applies certain rules to it. So for example, every %26lt;description%26gt; tag in the RSS feed is displayed as a paragraph on your webpage. It's a little too complicated to go into here, but do a search for XSLT tutorials, and you should find plenty.





Hope that helps a bit.
Reply:The easiest way to use RSS/XML I know of is the DynaWeb RSS Pal http://www.dynawebdesigns.com/dynamic/xm... Give it a try. I am using it on my websites and works great. In case you can't figure out how to use it, just get an XML feed and input it in the box. Then choose whether you want Javascript or ServerSide Code (php for example) and then click MAKE THE CODE. Then scroll down and get your code and put it on your website.





Now if you have your OWN FEED and you want people to subscribe to it, dont just post your xml link because then someone will just get the xml code page and be confused. Instead, you can post a link that says, "Add this feed to your web site" and link it to here http://www.dynawebdesigns.com/dynamic/xm... but replace the "http://domainnamehere.com/xmlfeed.xml" part with your actual feed URL.





Well, hope this helps you. Good luck and happy webmastering!
Reply:If you want to display the contents of your RSS feed as part of an html web page consider using a PHP script, rss2html. You can control they how the feed is displayed by creating a simply HTML template using indicators where you want the feed's contents to appear and what colors, fonts etc... that you want.





The nice part about using PHP to display the feed's contents is that search engines are able to spider the contents of the feed on the page. The contents will also dynamically update when the feed changes so that the page is very low maintenance once its created.





There is a free rss2html php script here: http://www.feedforall.com/scripts-direct...





Goodluck

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