Embedding RSS Feeds
- cell phones |
- meditation |
- Buddhism |
- dating |
- nerds & geeks |
- barcodes |
- photos |
- FAQ
- site map |
- RSS feed |
![[Valid RSS]](valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
AzaleaRSSRSS Feeds - the movie
In addition to web sites and blogs, RSS feeds are a way to publish information online. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is often used to publish short, timely information. Many of your favorite sites and web services offer their own RSS feeds or let you create your own RSS feeds through them. The list includes Flickr, Google Calendar, WordPress, Blogger, YouTube, etc.
A lot of people have heard of RSS, lots of us use it in one way or another but very few now what it's capable of. It's about time we all learn make our own RSS feeds! AzaleaRSS is a free RSS editor written in Excel. That's right, a spreadsheet that let's you configure and edit RSS 2.0 files.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed, have it pushed to your RSS reader, receive it on your cell phone, or incorporate it into your web site. There are lots of RSS readers, aggregators, widgets, gadgets, and plug-ins. And yes, there are RSS directories and search engines.
RSS files are small text files with their own unique URL. There are two flavors, RSS and Atom, and several versions of each. RSS is a subset of XML. For the purposes of this discussion, we're going to use RSS version 2.
A sample RSS 2.0 document looks like this:
Right click here to download and save sampleFeed.xml.
For what it's worth you can open and view the above sample RSS file in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. [MMM browser testing goes here...]
After you create your first RSS feed you should use a free online RSS validator to make sure it conforms to the RSS spec.
Announce that your site (or blog or YouTube channel or whatever) has an RSS feed by using any one of a number RSS icons.
If your wewb page has an RSS feed associated with it take advantage of autodiscovery by putting this line in the <head> of your HTML:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="yourSiteName RSS feed" href="http://www.yourSiteName.com/RSSfeedName.xml" />
Now I know how to embed the most recent RSS feed entry [JetCityOrange.com/RSS/sampleFeed.xml] into my HTML:
This is a Google AJAX call (my first I might add). Right click to view the page source to see how I did it. Now that I've got the trick down I can call 1 or more entries with or without the title, link, time, etc.
Use RSS feeds to plug holes inside your HTML. Make page templates that get populated by RSS feeds. That's what the big news sites do. You can too. Try AzaleaRSS and make your own feeds and podcasts. Update your pages with your RSS feed. Rotate variable text chunks via RSS. Call specific entries within your feed something like this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam laoreet porta quam.
RSS chunk 1
Ut tincidunt eros at dui malesuada convallis. Nulla facilisi. Ut convallis, turpis nec tincidunt posuere.
RSS chunk 2
I'm learning as I go but all of my RSS explorations and hacks are going on over at AzaleaRSS.com