Posts Tagged ‘RSS Feed’

Posted on November 18, 2009 - by Kelly Verge

How to Easily Create Your Own RSS Feed

RSS feeds have made it much easier for people to digest a great deal of information from different sources on the web. The information is streamlined so one can go through much more information than is possible via a web browser visiting a list of sites.

A side benefit for those of us with our own websites is that RSS feeds can be submitted to RSS directories. These directories are meant to be a way for people to find relevant feeds.

They are also a source of good, quickly-indexed backlinks.

This is all fine if you use a platform such as Wordpress that creates an RSS feed for you. However, what do you do if you’d like to create a feed for a static website – or even a feed with a list of pages you’d like to do some linkbuilding for?

WebDevTips has a site that lets you manually create an RSS feed from any page(s). I’ve even heard of people using this little trick to get forum profile pages indexed very quickly (Angela’s/Paul’s/Terry’s/etc.). Since there are a couple of errors with the procedures they have on their site, below is a step-by-step for those who need it.

• First, visit this site.
• Choose the number of links you need in your feed then fill in the information. The intent is to create a feed for a site with sub-pages, so you’d normally use the root URL in the “Site” area then the URL for each of your sub-pages in the other sections. If you’re using this technique for something different, you can just place a different URL in each block.
• Fill in details for each page on the list, then click the “make the code” button.
• Following the instructions on that page, copy/paste the code into a new file named your_filename.rss. Please note that when you’re editing the file, you’ll need to change the following text:
• At the top of the file, replace

http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd

with

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-0.91.dtd

• Upload the file to your server, then validate the feed by entering its URL at http://feedvalidator.org.
• If all is good, you can now submit your new feed to RSS directories. Feel free to use whatever method you normally use, or if you don’t have a list of RSS directories, check out my list.

If you’re following XFactor’s Adsense method and using XSite to create your mini-niche sites, this is a great way to get an RSS feed “out there” so that the spiders will quickly find and index your site.

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Posted on August 5, 2009 - by Kelly Verge

Top 8 Yahoo Pipes for RSS Readers or Autoblogging

For those who use RSS feeds to streamline their daily consumption of web information, Yahoo Pipes can be a great tool.  Using pipes, you can combine, extract, sort, filter, chop, dice, and puree your favorite feeds.

The problem with Yahoo Pipes is that there is a learning curve.  Thankfully, any pipe that has been created can be used by anyone else, and Yahoo has thoughtfully included a search function.

Below is a list of the top 8 Pipes we’ve found (so far):

• Aggregated News Alerts – Enter a search term and this pipe will blend searches from Bloglines, Findory, Google Blog Search, Google News, IceRocket, MSFT Live News, Technorati, and Yahoo! News.
• Daily Feeds Mashup - A large smashup of such sites as: Lifehacker, Duggmirror (forecast), Digg, Slashdot, Kottke, Boing Boing, Reddit, Engadget, Del.icio.us, Stumble Buzz and more sorted by date. It also appends the originating site’s name to the title and corrects for duplicates.
• Hot Deals Search - Finds deals from all major deal sites in US… Fetches deals simultaneously by running parallel threads… Sorts deals based on publication date of the deal (latest first).
• Top Tech Gadgets - Fetches only the hottest gadget news from around the web.
• Video Game Video-Reviews - From IGN, Gamespot, Gamepro, GameTrailers, 1UP, G4’s X-Play and The Escapist’s Zero Punctuation.
• Super Digg Feed v2.0 - This pipes makes your boring old Digg rss feed into a SUPER Digg rss feed. It adds category information, submitter information (with a link to the users page), Digg count, number of comments (with link to the comment page), and a link to the direct page, bypassing Digg. It also comes with a relevant Flickr picture (click to go to the flickr page).
• eBay Partner Price Search - This Pipe was designed eBay’s new affiliate partner program for the US. It will allow you to add your search terms and enter your Campaign Id Number, Custom Id , Minimum amount and Maximum amounts.
• Full Text RSS Builder - This pipe fetches the specified RSS feed, reads the web pages indicated in the links of the RSS feed items, extracts the contents from the web pages between the specified tags, and write back the extracted contents into the description of the RSS feed items. Use this pipe to build your own full-text RSS.

Of course, not only can the RSS output from these pipes be used via an RSS reader, they could also be used as content – either in an RSS widget or even using something like FeedWordPress to provide content for an autoblog.

Let me know if you use any cool pipes, and I’ll take a look at them, too.

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