What You Should Know About

More and more companies are using RSS as a means to communicate, so having an RSS feed that is professional and well polished will help differentiate your company from your competition. What does a RSS feed professional? Follow these simple steps to Polish your RSS feed and take it to the next level ... 1. feed image add an image to your RSS feed. The image is displayed by many feed readers every time your feed is displayed. This will help build and strengthen their brand or image in the minds of people who read your RSS feed. Add a picture to an RSS feed is relatively easy, and adds a level of professionalism. 2. Images and Links to add pictures and links in the RSS feed. The process of adding images and links to the description field of an RSS feed is really quite simple, if you are using software to manage your feed, while it may be somewhat complicated, if you hand-coding your feed. Incorporate images or hot links in the feed content will allow your readers to explore further and dig deeper into your content. An additional benefit is, of course, the additional links back to your website from all Web sites that choose to publish or your feed content is displayed. 3. Validatewell-formed code is important to ensure that all RSS readers can read and display your feed. But it is also very important for another reason ... nothing is more embarrassing or unprofessional than an RSS feed is broken or stops working. Use software to manage your feed creation, and validate your feed on a regular basis. 4. easy to Subscribe make your RSS feed is easy to subscribe. Include traditional RSS icon or an indicator of the entire site so that site visitors can easily find and subscribe to RSS feeds. Include basic guidance on how site visitors should subscribe to your RSS feed. 5. Auto Discovery add "auto-discovery" code in the HTML header of your site. Many RSS aggregators include an auto-discovery feature, which allows them to automatically detect when a site offers an RSS feed. If you want visitors to your Web site uses one of these news readers, would you immediately know that an RSS feed to your content is accessible from your Web site. Instantly create auto discovery 6 code-http://www.feedforall.com/autodiscovery.htm. Favicon adds a "favicon" for your site. Favicons (short for "Favorites icon") is typically a small version of a company or the logo of the site and appears in the URL of the user's Web browser. When a user bookmarks a specific Web page that contains a favicon, loads this Web page customized icon in the user's browser. Because the favicon is usually appears next to the address of Web site, it may act as a small logo or icon, which visitors can use to remember the site or the site address. RSS feed directories and search engines will often use a favicon next to an RSS feed listings. So make sure that you have one on your site; Otherwise, you have nothing else than a generic icon next to your feed. Webmasters can establish brand by creating a favicon for your website. Here is a free service from 7 HTMLKit: http://www.html-kit.com/favicon. Subscription to always your own Feed Subscribe to your RSS feed, so you can see, see visitors on the site. It is not necessary to incorporate the above elements in your RSS feed will result in additions of a more professional and polished RSS stands apart from competitors in News aggregators and RSS folders. Spending a few extra minutes here could easily do more attention to your feed. About the author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing and publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.

RSS is a standard for syndicating content on the Internet. RSS feeds are used in many different ways to distribute all types of content over the Internet. Benefits for individuals to subscribe to RSS feeds has resulted in a rapid growth and adoption rate. Software and tools have made RSS feed creation and management easy, even for non-technical persons who also have gas-driven growth of RSS feeds.
How to create RSS It is no longer necessary to manually create an RSS feed. There are a number of WYSIWYG software programs available, which simplifies the creation of an RSS feed. This means that webmasters really don't need to understand the code and details about the RSS specification to create an RSS feed. Such a product is FeedForAll, where you can easily create, edit and publish RSS feeds. Both Mac and Windows versions are available at http://www.feedforall.com.
Feeds can also be manually designed from scratch as well as, and there is a simple tutorial that will walk you through the process at http://www.make-rss-feeds.com/making-an-rss-feed.htm.
And if you have existing content in a database that you want to include in an RSS feed, you can use a PHP script which SQL2RSS to extract data from the database and fill out an RSS feed.
All these things will simplify the process and contribute to the creation of an RSS feed. Transfer When RSS feed is created, it must be transferred to the server home page, as is commonly done using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software. If you use RSS feed creation software, it will have a built-in FTP client for this purpose. Otherwise, you can use a different FTP client to upload RSS feeds to the website. Validate When you have built a feed, it should be validated. If you use software (such as FeedForAll), it may have a built-in validator to help you assure that the feed is correct and correct. If you build the feed by hand, must ensure that you are using a sort of validator to ensure feed formed correctly. A feed that contains invalid syntax will not be readable by many of the RSS readers so that validation is very important. RSS promotion After you have created, transmitted and validated an RSS feed, you need to your website visitors should know that it is available. There are a number of ways to promote your RSS feed. The more made an effort to promote the feed more quickly becomes popular. In order to send a signal to your website visitors, as an RSS feed is available as content related to the home page, includes most webmasters colorful graphics on your Web site. It has become standard that nearly all Web sites with RSS feeds available use colorful graphics such as flags to indicate that RSS feeds are available for specific content. The Flag was originally standardized as light orange rectangles but as the popularity has grown, webmasters have bent the rules a little and have been more creative with their flag, and graphics. Use colorful graphics that work within your website design to indicate that you have an RSS feed available.
In addition, many RSS feed readers and aggregators to automatically detect the presence of an RSS feed on your site if you are adding a little bit of code in the header field in an HTML page ....
[link rel = "alternate" type = "application/rss + xml" title = "rss" href = "http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml"]
Make sure to replace http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml "" with the actual URL to the RSS feed and replace the "[" and "]"<" less-than="" and="" "="">"in square brackets with" greater-than symbols.
In order to increase the exposure of an RSS feed, it should also be submitted to the RSS search engines and directories. Just as you would send the URL of a Web site or a Web page to a search engine, you must send the link to the actual RSS feed located on your site to the various RSS directories. There is a long list of RSS directories at http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm. Ongoing RSS Feed-maintenance Feed maintenance is a very important aspect to the RSS feeds. You want to continuously add to your RSS feed for giving subscribers a new and changing content and information. Otherwise, they lose interest and find information elsewhere. As a rapidly growing number of content sources, new and old, add RSS as a key distribution channel, and as more and more people use RSS news readers and aggregators to keep themselves informed, the ability to maintain high exposure and visibility gradually switched from complete attention on major search engines and content optimization techniques to a growing awareness of RSS feed directories and search Tools. About the author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing and publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.

Daily more and more websites, news services and blogs are adding RSS content. RSS is a method of syndicating content.The concept of aggregating content in a central location or warehouse is very appealing. Consumers have been tired of push technology, RSS gives users the flexibility to regain control of their content. RSS feed creators provide content without forcing it on to consumers. In fact with RSS consumers are able to choose the content they want to view.

How to make a RSS Feed
RSS feeds contain what are referred to as "elements". Elements are normally connected in some way and contain a common theme or other similarity.

If you want to save themselves headaches of hand-code consider an RSS feed to use FeedForAll, application user friendly software that formats the XML for you.

Contains eight items at the time of writing the following feed materials http://www.notepage.net/feed.xml. The items are all SMS and paging related news articles which would probably be beneficial to anyone interested in the wireless market.

Each element contains:

Title and description must be written to describe the content and the link must refer to the Web page that contains the actual content.

Just as html uses XML file open and close tags to designate a title, description and link. The codes are enclosed in <>in square brackets, like standard HTML and close the code contains a forward slash/.

The following is an element in an XML file looks like:

Description goes here
http://www.linkgoeshere.com

As I mentioned earlier, an RSS feeds contains elements and, like the above marks an open and close tag is used to distinguish between elements.

Description goes here
http://www.linkgoeshere.com

Another description goes here
http://www.anotherlinkgoeshere.com

Now an RSS feed is a range of topics, to link these items together to create what is called a "channel".

Channel appears at the top of the file and tell people how items relate to each other. Like the elements user channels title, description, and link tags to describe its contents. The code open channel event occurs before the first element and exits mark occurs after the last element.

Explanation of how the elements are related goes here
http://www.directoryoflinksgohere

Description goes here
http://www.linkgoeshere.com

Another description goes here
http://www.anotherlinkgoeshere.com

Finally, you identify the file by specifying it is an XML file by inserting the xml and rss define codes at the beginning and end.

Explanation of how the elements are related goes here
http://www.directoryoflinksgohere

Description goes here
http://www.linkgoeshere.com

Another description goes here
http://www.anotherlinkgoeshere.com

When you save the file, you must save it as an XML file.

Warning
If you create the file using Dreamweaver or a similar tool that it does not deprive becareful out is marks it feels redundant. In order to be a RSS-feed your file should be on that marks that were discussed above, and the file will not be valid, if the codes are dressed like minimum.

I found a cool small, freely distributable program that helped in the creation of the xml file is called first object editor http://www.firstobject.com/

Validation
As my math teacher use to say, check your work! When your file is finished and uploaded einter for animal feed validator by http://feedvalidator.org

Syndication/submission
If you've made it this far you are in good shape, it is time to "publish" your content! Submit your RSS feed (the XML file you created) to the Web sites, just as you would send a Web page. Some of the more popular Web sites that accept RSS files can be found under "Post rss Feed"
http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/RSS-feeds.html

About the author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for the Note Page, Inc. http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, http://www.messaging-software.net and http://www.monitoring-software.net