Content Syndication with RSS

Once You Have Created Your Simple RSS Feed

Once you have created your feed, there are just one or two more things to do. None of these are mandatory, but they are all so simple, and give so much to the richness of the Net, that you are encouraged to invest the little time needed.

Publish a Link

Place a link to the RSS feed on your page! Many people forget to do this and wonder why, after looking at their server logs, no one is subscribed to their feed. There are standard icons emerging from each of the news aggregators and desktop readers — some of these are freely available for this use, but even a simple text link is better than nothing at all.

Registering with Aggregators

Chapter 10 deals with news aggregators in more detail, so for now we’ll look only at the postcreation chores. Registering your feed at the major aggregators will help people and automatic services find your information. For example, most of the desktop news readers available today will use the lists of feeds available at Syndic8 as a menu of feeds available to their users. Being part of this is a good thing. Here are a few of the major aggregators and their URLs:

Syndic8

http://www.syndic8.com/suggest_start.php

NewsIsFree

http://www.newsisfree.com/contact.php

Userland

http://aggregator.userland.com/register

Once that’s done, you need to edit the HTML of your front page (the page that your RSS feed links to from its link element).

Metadata for the Main Page

Your front page needs some metadata within it. First, we ...