Why should I produce it?

Syndicating headlines is an excellent and cost-effective way of driving traffic to, and increasing brand awareness of, any website that publishes new content regularly.

Once a website produces an RSS file, they are enabling others to syndicate their headlines, without any further work on their part.

The main benefits of creating an RSS file:

  • RSS content can be included in customisable online news portals that aggregate RSS headlines like My.Userland.Com.
  • Websites that display news headlines can use an RSS file to incorporate another websites headlines into their own.
  • RSS content can be added to personal desktop news reading applications like Headline Viewer or Radio Userland.
  • Email newsletter providers could allow users to subscribe to RSS channels. XML.com and XMLTree.com previously offered such a service called Newsboy.

    One positive side effect of producing an RSS file is that it can also be used by headline aggregation services like Moreover.com, who power news portals, specialist news search engines, business intelligence services or provide newsfeeds to websites. Most such companies use crawler-based technologies to aggregate and do not insist upon content being available in RSS, however they do have some requirements which having an RSS file addresses, sparing the need for any work on the part of a website that already publishes its headlines in RSS.

    • How can I produce it?

    Tools

  • BlogifyYourPage, makes it easy to produce an RSS 1.0 file for any page.
  • RSSify your web page, produce an RSS 0.92 file for any page.
  • RSS Channel Editor is a simple Perl CGI script that makes it easy to maintain an RSS channel. It can be used online at Webreference and you can also download the source.

    RSS Tutorials - The Basics:

  • A step-by-step guide to building an RSS 1.0 document from the O’Reilly Network.
  • An easy to understand introduction to RSS 0.91 from About.com.
  • A comprehensive guide to creating RSS 0.91 files from Webreference.

    RSS Tutorials - Generating RSS:

  • Active Server Pages (ASP) An article explaining how RSS files can be generated using ASP.
  • Perl Jonathan Eisenzopf explains how his XML::RSS module can be used to create an RSS file.
  • PHP phpChannel, a set of two PHP class files to write rss files. RSS Tools

    Validators

  • http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/
  • http://aggregator.userland.com/validator
  • http://soapclient.com/rss/rss.html

    RSS Examples:

  • Newsfeeds reviews sources of RSS files, good examples and ideas you can use in putting together your own feed.
  • OurFavoriteSongs.Com is a source of popular syndicated files, the top picks of Radio Userland users.

    Miscellaneous tools

  • ASPrss. Sample code and tutorial on producing RSS from an MS ASP driven web site.
  • Squish An SQL-like RDF query language. RSS is used as a demo application to show its uses.
  • Squishdot RSS Support A DTML method file for Zope-based Squishdot to allow it to produce RSS files.
  • mod_index_rss An Apache module to display directories as RSS feeds.

    • Which standard should I use for my feed?

    Actually it really doesn’t matter much. Virtually all readers can cope with all the standards. See “Which standard is most widely used?“