RSS promotion Article series: Setting up RSS feeds for increase in website traffic.

On my last post on using RSS feeds for increased website traffic series, I posted about a shortcut to Yahoo Directory by submitting your RSS feed to My Yahoo. I got many questions from people asking me what and how RSS feeds are created. In my post, I suggested a few affordable RSS tools that one could use to create RSS easily without any tehnical knowledge. But I came across this article that just kinda explains more:


Set Up a Simple Syndication Feed Using RSS
You can set up outbound syndication for your Web site and expose your content to the world in one afternoon using an XML technology called RSS. For anyone who ever wanted to increase audience and traffic while maintaining content and presentation control, RSS is the answer. Find out how to do it, step by step.
by Ladd Angelius

An RSS XML feed is an extremely simple way to let external sites link to content on your Web site. If you're looking for a fast, painless way to do outbound syndication and find a larger audience for your content, RSS is going to be worth your time.

At its most basic, RSS generates a list of links, generated programmatically, to various resources on your site with a description of the content for each link. This XML feed is just a publicly accessible text file and therefore you can easily create your feed to automatically regenerate periodically. This way, new content updates are added to the list without any human effort. With RSS, your news feed can be as dynamic as you like.

And, because it's in XML, other sites can easily consume and display your content feed automatically, thereby driving traffic back to your site. This is a win-win situation for sites that want to increase their traffic while maintaining control of their content.

In this article, you'll learn what you need to create a feed, see a sample feed structure, walk through the code that creates the XML (in this case we've used ColdFusion). I'll also discuss additional steps to take for validating and implementing syndication for your site.
What You NeedTo create the system to generate an RSS feed and make it publicly accessible, you will need three things: a server on the Internet where you can put the feed, a database that has descriptions of your content, and a server-side scripting language with access to your database.

Decide where you will put the file on your Web site. You may want to have multiple feeds in the future, so consider putting it in a directory called "rss." Decide on a filename that you will not change and put it on your Web site in a location that can remain the same for the foreseeable future. Here's an example location and filename:
http://www.myWebSite.com/rss/myWebSite.xml

Decide what content you want to put in the feed. Keep in mind that you will need, at a minimum, two pieces of information for each piece of content you want to syndicate: the title of the content and the URL. For example:

Title: "Choosing the Right Web Services Management Platform"Link: http://www.devx.com/content/id/10549

Optionally, there are additional fields you should include for each piece of content, for example:
Description: When you deploy any application, you are expected to have a plan for management and maintenance of that codebase—that's part of the job. But developers have been so busy learning Web services that management issues have taken a back seat. Use these requirements as a checklist for investigating products that should underlie your company's vital Web services and facilitate their long-term management.

Remember that the author field must contain a valid email address to validate as RSS. The PubDate filed must be properly formatted as a datetime field. For example:
Author: justin.murray@hp.com (Justin Murray)PubDate: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 14:20:36 PST
You can use whatever scripting language you like, anything from Perl to ASP. You must be able to do simple string manipulation, pull data from your database, and set the MIME type of the file being served to the browser.

A Sample RSS FeedOnce you have completed steps 1 and 2 on the previous page, it's time to dynamically build the text file. This file will be formatted as XML and has two distinct sections. The top section contains basic information about your feed, such as the title and the time the file was generated. The bottom section has information on each specific piece of content that you wish to syndicate (an "item").

I'll show an example feed, and then I'll show how to generate and write out the file in ColdFusion. The example feed follows; bold items should be replaced with information for your site.

**SORRY THE CODE COULD NOT BE MADE VISIBLE.




http://www.devx.com
Latest DevX Content
en-us
Copyright 2003 DevX
http://backend.userland.com/rss
Fri, 24 Jan 2003 12:38:45 PST
If you want to show an image with your content feed, use the optional image section below:


http://www.devx.com/assets/devx/3182.gif
http://www.DevX.com

The next section is where each piece of content is identified and described:


A future where millions of
users are waiting.
http://www.devx.com/content/id/10559
editorial@devx.com
Wed, 22 Jan 2003 11:19:28 PST



etc
etc
etc

You can include as many items as you want. When you're finished, close the channel and rss tags.
(Article from http://www.devx.com/xml/Article/10790 )

If all these doesnt make sense, or if you dont have time to do the hard coding, I would recommend RSS tools like Tristana RSS Writer:($25) , Simple software that is easy to use to create RSS feeds and FeedForAll: ($52.37) ( looks like a nice suite of software. Never used it myself.) or MyRSSCreator program. Their service is $19.97/month and it is a web based program where one can create an RSS feed by filling a form. No website needed, they host everything for you, no software download, you wont need a feed reader to read your feeds. With the 30-day trial you can use this RSS tool to Create Your First RSS Feed Right Now for FREE and start getting the benefits of an inreased website traffic.