The RSS Advantage

It really ticks me off when people who don’t understand what they are talking about try to promote themselves as egg-spurts (experts)! Especially when they claim that RSS is a broadcasting or push medium. Here is what the word ‘broadcast‘ means according to dictionary.com:

1. to transmit (programs) from a radio or television station.
3. to cast or scatter abroad over an area, as seed in sowing.
4. to spread widely; disseminate: She broadcast the good news all over town.

According to my understanding (disclaimer: if I am mistaken, I am always ready to be corrected): Broadcasting involves someone or something transmitting a message.

Now can someone please explain to me, “How the (insert favorite expletive here) does a web server transmit a message?” Unless there is some new technology available out there that I am not aware of there is NO WAY that your web server transmits or pushes your RSS feed to your subscribers.

Here’s the truth: Your RSS feed is ‘pulled‘ off your web server by the subscriber’s RSS reader.
Sorry about the ranting, but I just had to get that off my chest.

Technorati Tags: RSS Broadcasting

So how does RSS really work? In order to understand… “No, don’t worry I will not be throwing technical terms around…” RSS lives up to it’s
acronym (Really Simple Syndication). RSS is basically a “publish and subscribe” medium. In other words you, the website or blog owner, publishes your RSS feed on your website and Internet users subscribe to your the published feed.
Here’s how it works:

1. You make RSS feed available on your web server
2. Internet users subscribe to your feed with their RSS reader

Simple! The only thing that can complicate RSS are the methods you use to
create and update your RSS feed.
In other words, publishing your RSS feed can be as simple as placing an RSS
formatted data file on your server to as complex as integrating it with calls to
your corporate Enterprise Management System - each of these methods come with
their own advantages and disadvantages. I have already covered the ‘how to’ of
creating an RSS feed manually in previous posts and will be writing about the
various other methods of RSS feed creation in the future. If you are in a hurry
to implement RSS on your website, the quickest, easiest and cheapest way to
implement it is to start using blogging software like WordPress or Movable Type.

Technorati Tags: RSS Beginner

With everyone (including me) raving about how great RSS is and how it is going to revolutionize the online world, I thought I find out what the current disadvantages are for feed publishers.

Well this is what I came up with:

1. Lack of public awareness. Last year Forrester Research published a report that showed RSS awareness at about 6% of the population in the United States. These numbers are old and I believe that RSS consumption is increasing, but these are the numbers that we have for now.
2. Reluctance to change. People have just recently become accustomed to having email in their everyday lives and they are reluctant to change.
3. Perception of complexity. Let’s face it, RSS sounds complicated! Unfortunately the legacy of three letter acronyms from the technology world has left a lasting impression on the average non-technical human being.
4. RSS reader software diversity. Because of all the different kinds of RSS newsreaders out there we have to keep the lowest common denominator in our content i.e. text only.
5. Pressure to provide value content. Unlike our cousins in email marketing we do not have the luxury of complex unsubscription mechanisms or subscriber ‘laziness’. The ease at which our subscribers can leave is unprecedented. To retain our subscriber’s interest we need to provide good quality and relevant content in our RSS feeds.

These are the five most common barriers that we need to overcome. Of the five, the first four can be overcome.

Technorati Tags: Publishing RSS Feeds

There is no rocket science involved in this RSS promotion technique. It is extremely simple and Yahoo even tells you how to do it on their RSS submission page. You will need a My Yahoo account to do this - if you don’t have one, no problem, they provide you with a link on the submit page so you can sign up. (It’s free so everyone can afford it - and you get another email address to play around with too).

1. Sign into your My Yahoo account and then go back to the submission page.
2. Enter your RSS feed URL into the text box provided and click on the “Add” button.
3. Now subscribe to your own feed to get your RSS feed added into Yahoo’s RSS directory.

By the way Yahoo’s RSS publisher guide is worth taking a look at and they provide some good guidelines.

Technorati Tags: RSS Promotion

How would you like to forget about scrambling through your email InBox filtering out spam and looking for news messages? How would you like to have news from your favorite hobby site delivered to your desktop? These are just two of the problems that RSS solves, here are the rest:

1. RSS Delivers the latest news to your desktop
   RSS helps you stay in touch with the huge amount of information available on the Internet. Your RSS reader contacts every one of your favorite websites and retrieves the latest news for you. Depending on which RSS reader you use, it can sort and filter your news as well. You don’t have to go get the news anymore, it comes to you! Whether it is about the weather, new music, software upgrade, local news, or a new posting from a rarely-updated site, you learn about it as soon as it comes out.
2. RSS saves you time
   You no longer need to surf through each and every one of your favorite websites, blogs or news sites to find out what is new. You also don’t need to scan through all 500 of your bookmarks and check if there is perhaps a site you haven’t visited recently. With RSS and depending on the RSS reader you have, you can subscribe to a website’s RSS feed at the click of a button.
3. RSS puts you in complete control of the news your receive
   You select the content that you want, when you want it and the way you want it. You get to look at it when you want to too. An RSS feed enables website owners to put the right information into your hands. You are completely free to choose which websites to subscribe to with your RSS reader.
4. RSS give you instant unsubscribe
   If you don’t want to receive information from an RSS feed publisher anymore you can just hit the delete button in your RSS reader and, “Wham! That feed is history.” You don’t need to confirm or notify anyone that you don’t want to receive their information anymore like you need to with email.
5. RSS allows you complete anonymity and is 100% SPAM-free
   You do not have to send anyone any personal information to subscribe to their public RSS feed. And because you haven’t provided anyone any information you don’t have to worry about what may happen if you unsubscribe from an RSS feed. With RSS you can free up your email’s InBox and receive your news through RSS.

This is the fourth of a six part series on manually building an RSS feed for your website. The series is targeted at non-technical beginners without any prior knowledge of RSS.

Previous posts: Building an RSS feed: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

In this part I will show you how to create your news items (known as entries in Atom). Open up your XML Notepad and load your “atom.xml” file from the previous part. Expand the entry element as shown in the screenshot below:

You will need to edit and update the following items:

1. title - this is title or headline of your newsitem
2. expand the link element and update the href attribute with the URL to the newsitem. For example: http://www.MyWebSite.com/articles/article541.htm.
3. id - This is the id of the newsitem. id values must be unique within a feed. A good rule of thumb here is to just use the same URL as the link in point #2.
4. published - this is the timestamp that your news item was first created. (See part 3 for more details about the timestamp format)
5. updated - this is the timestamp for when your new item was last updated or edited.
6. summary - The summary contains a short description or excerpt of your news item.
7. author - Expand the author element and enter the your name in the name element and your website URL in the uri element.

To add additional news items:

1. Right-click on the entry element with your mouse and select copy
2. Then click on the feed element to select it.
3. Go to the menu and select Edit > Paste Struncture.

When you have finished editing your Atom feed, save it and upload it to your web server.

Some Important Notes:

1. Always make sure that you edit the correct entry and check the sort order of your entries. The newset entry should always be the FIRST one under the updated element and the oldest one is the LAST one in the structure.
2. Limit the number of items in your feed list. You shouldn’t have too many because this will bloat the file size and may upset some RSS readers or the search engines. A good rule of thumb is to keep about ten to twenty items in the feed at one time.

That’s it for today.

Technorati Tags: Publishing RSS Feeds; Build an RSS feed

This is the third of a six part series on manually building an RSS feed for your website. The series is targeted at non-technical beginners without any prior knowledge of RSS.

Previous posts: Building an RSS feed: Part 1 (RSS 2.0), Part 2 (RSS 2.0)

Before we get started there that you need to download my blank Atom template and you should have XML Notepad installed. (See Part 1 for the download and installation instructions). Open the template in XML Notepad.

You can see the structure of the Atom feed in the left hand pane while the right pane displays the data. The “feed” in the parent node of the structure identifies that this is an Atom feed file. To keep this tutorial simple we will only be focusing on the areas that we need to change to create your feed. This part of the tutorial will cover the “header” part that contains information about your feed. In part 4 we will discuss editing and creating the actual newsfeed items.

These are the elements that you need to change:

1. The title element.
   Replace the Your_Website_Title_Goes_Here text with the name of your website or RSS feed.
2. Next you can see two link elements. Expand the first one by clicking on the ‘+’ sign and replace the http://www.Your_Website_Url_Goes_Here.com text with your website’s URL.
3. Now expand the second of the link elements and replace http://www.Your_Website_Url_Goes_Here.com/atom.xml with the URL where your Atom feed will be on your website.
4. Replace Unique_Id_For_Your_RSS_Feed with a unique name for your feed.
5. Adjust the updated element with the correct timestamp that the feed was updated. The time format may be strange for you at first. This is the key for the date format: yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss+01:00Z
   • The first four digits are the year
   • followed by the month
   • then the day
   • The time is separated by the ‘T’ and contains the hour : minutes : seconds
   • separated by the time zone offset is expressed in UTC (GMT)

In the example file the timestamp 2006-07-10T15:28:36-05:00Z means that the file was last updated July 10, 2006 at 3:28:36 pm in the US Central time zone.

Note: You only need to set this channel information once because you will be editing and updating the same file as you add content to your feed. Don’t forget to change the updated element whenever you save the file!

Save your file now using File > Save As … and give it the name of “atom.xml”.

In the next part we will continue to build our Atom format feed by the editing and adding the news feed items.

Technorati Tags: Publishing RSS Feeds; Build an RSS feed

A short time ago Google released their own web based RSS reader. I decided to check it out today to see if was any good. One thing to note is that it’s still a “beta” product and like most tools from Google it is free.

To access the Google Reader you will need a Google account, if you don’t have one you can create one on the same page. Before you continue reading I must confess that I hate web-based applications… so there is my disclaimer! These are my findings:
It took me a while to get used to the interface and it was confusing at first. The web page is split into three sections:

A. The top bar where you have the following options: Home, Read items, Starred, Subscriptions and Labels. This is where I got confused because I am used to the top bar of a web page being a navigation menu taking me to different pages on a site. The first three items (home, read and starred) are actually filters on your news items and the last three items are “management” items.

B. The next section is the left pane that displays your list of news items. A box surrounds the current news item and the item is shown on the right pane. A list of “controls” (top, up, down, refresh and page up) is located at the top of the pane for you to move through the items. At the bottom of the left pane you can sort items by date or automatically. There is also an additional filter there where you can select whether to display or hide your read items. Next to each list item is a small star that you click on to star/unstar the news item.

C. The right hand pane displays your selected news item. There are also additional options here to unsubscribe from the RSS feed, email the item and blog about it (if you have a blogger account).

So what do I think of Google’s reader? I don’t like it and I definitely won’t be using it anytime soon. The interface is semi-confusing and news item control is spread all over the place.

A few of the things that I don’t like:

1. You have two different places on the screen to apply filtering on your items - the top pane to select all, read or starred items and then the left pane to hide or display read items.
2. If I want to star an item I need to go to the left pane, to keep an item unread I have to go to the right pane.
3. When I subscribe to a feed I want to get a complete list of items from that feed. I don’t want to click a link saying “To return more items from source…” to get all the news items.
4. I like to have a list of subscriptions “on hand” so that when I select one I only get it’s new items.

On the plus side of the equation these are the two things that I like:

1. I can sort my news items by date
2. I have a direct link to Blogger to blog about a news item.

Selection of an RSS reader is a matter of personal choice and preference. If you use Google Reader and like it feel free to comment below or, if you agree with me, share what you don’t like about Google Reader.

Technorati Tags: RSS Readers