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Step by step Guide to Creat Your Own Rss Feed
1. What Is RSS Feed?
• The channel information (one per feed)
• The item information (many per feed)
Example – You may create a RSS feed about all articles on your web site.
Then the channel will contain information about the feed (“Read articles on various subjects”), the location (web site address or URL) and a short description.
There will be multiple items in the RSS Feed. Each item will have information about one article (the title, author, category, short description and the URL where the article may be found).
As you will see for yourself, RSS is really simple ☺
2. Who Should Provide An RSS Feed?
You should provide an RSS feed if you want to distribute your information to a vast and fast-growing community of users, who are actively looking for information on your topic.
In general, people who write articles or publish newsletters benefit the most. Most blog software (another hot topic but we will discuss the blogs in another report) allow you to offer RSS feed of the blog posts. You can also offer your press releases through an RSS feed.
In general, anything that you publish frequently can be offered as an RSS feed.
Soon you will find online retailers and other catalog companies also offering RSS feeds of their product range.
3. Why Should You Provide An RSS feed?
Because this is going to be the hottest way to provide regular information updates in 2005.You might be aware that most emailed newsletters do not reach more than 30-40% of the subscribers because of spam filtering, blacklisted domains and several other reasons. The world is fast moving from a push-based information delivery (where you send information via emails) to a pull-based information delivery (where the subscriber accesses your information as and when he wants).
RSS is fast becoming the de-facto standard for pull-based information delivery because the user can anonymously subscribe to your feed, judge your content and stay subscribed as long as he wants to. He can unsubscribe at will, without any problems and delays.
There are no spam complaints. No lost deliveries.
The authors of the newsletters have to continually provide high quality information so that the users will stay subscribed and read the new articles or newsletter issues and this will improve the overall standard of information available. Junk dies a quick death.
This definitely does not mean that email is obsolete. It has its own advantages. Till the time, RSS becomes as popular and omni-present as email is now, you cannot ignore email-based newsletters. Also, you cannot get the exact number of the people who have subscribed to your RSS feed because RSS subscription is anonymous.
Embracing RSS technology right now can put you on the fast track and give you an edge over your competitors who are slow in adopting this hot new technology.
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