Who Else wants to Fire Their Boss

This is a continuation from my first article on RSS – “RSS Mania Addiction – An Introduction to RSS and the Terminology”

Well so now you kind of like, are in love, or are obsessed with RSS. Those little orange buttons are all over and you want to put one up in your web site or Blog or on your wall. That is cool, and it will demand a bit of technical knowledge, some writing, some research and some frustration. So here are the major steps to publishing your RSS feeds and giving all that information to the world at large, which I will discuss in depth with examples in this series of articles. Right now we will outline these steps.

1. Sit back, STOP! & Think. (How is that for step one?)

* a. Do you have information that should or would go into an RSS file? Remember that the unwritten rules of RSS is that you must update the file with “new” and more “current” information if not hourly or daily, but at least on a fairly common basis. No one is going to want to keep your RSS in their reader if the information they see every day for the next month is exactly the same as the day before it.

* b. Additionally, though some people do this, it really is NOT good practice to put long essays into an RSS feed. What you want is the first line or description of an object, idea or news. Hook the person so he clicks on the topic in his reader, reads the summary, clicks again and finds himself on your web page.

* c. Do you have the time to do it? There are millions of Blogs out there that were started with the best of intentions. One entry, two entries, three entries. And then they die. Why? Because the author/owners simply had no clue about the dedication demanded and time needed to update their Blogs on a regular basis. They also had no idea just how difficult he competition was to get people to read those Blogs. The same is true with RSS. You start a feed to get readers, or to pass on information to the web. You need to understand this is going to take time and patience and work. This is not a one-time one-shot one-pie-in-the-sky deal.

2. Your depth of Technical knowledge

You will need to become familiar with the following terms and understand them and perhaps learn some very simple things in how to program them.

1. RSS

2. XML

3. HTML

4. CSS

5. Atom

6. RSS Readers

7. RSS Parsers

8. RSS Validation

3. Now begins the Actual WORK!

* a. Preparing the file – You will need a template RSS file (for the sake of these articles it will be called rss.xml though it can have any name you choose as long as it is in xml format.) Unless you are good enough to write one yourself this is critical.
* b. Understanding the Template and what information goes where
* c. Putting the information into the template – Each piece of information you have will go into specific [headers] and you must understand the RSS structure in the XML file to get that right.
* d. Validating the Template – A crucial aspect. Unlike HTML, RSS is very, very, let me say this again, very unforgiving. It does not like deviations from the norm or from the basic format laid down. Getting it right can be the most trying and frustrating part of the process.

4. Okay now you wrote the RSS file, your XML file is ready and validated. Now what? Guess you think you are done. Think again.

* a. You will have to place the rss.xml file on your web site or somewhere on the web where people can get to it.
* b. Now you can steal, get, copy, make – whatever you choose – your own little XML/RSS or RSS – Valid button.
* c. Hyperlink your file to the RSS
* d. Submit your file under the correct category to RSS directories.

5. How many people will pick up your RSS? I will discuss this as well in a later article, but surprisingly, the answer here is still very vague. There are some ways of tracing the numbers, but none are foolproof, and most are very convoluted.

6. Go and get a good night’s sleep cause tomorrow you are going to have to start the process of adding information to your RSS (or changing it) all over again!

(This is a continuation from my first article on RSS – “RSS Mania Addiction – An Introduction to RSS and the Terminology”)

Copyright © 2005 Ted W. Gross. All rights reserved. (You may publish this article in its entirety with the following author’s information with live links only.)

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Not to long ago I finally decided to check out what all those little orange buttons that said “RSS” or “XML” were about. It seemed to me that either my vision was permanently impaired or every web-site I visited suddenly spouted an RSS tag, and that proudly. I wanted to know just what those ubiquitous orange buttons meant and how they operated.

Well, in a few days I was an RSS freak. Obsessed. Totally grounded in RSS mania and those little news items coming across my reader. Of course, I had a reader for my desktop, and a reader that conveniently placed itself within my Firefox Browser. I was RSS ready for anything! And you know what. BEST OF ALL its almost ALL FREE. (If it isn’t it does not find a place on my computer!)

For those among the plebeians of the world who are not familiar with RSS and what you can do with it, this article will attempt to explain the basics in RSS terminology and how you can become as obsessed with RSS as I am. In a future article I will attempt to explain how to create your own RSS feeds as well.

RSS Feed – The information that a web site will place within the RSS file for you to read is known as a “feed”. RSS Reader – The software you use, either browser based or desktop based that you use to pick up the feed and read it.

1. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or so they tell us. Well so we don’t get too complicated, RSS has gone through a few permutations based upon its versions and maturing.

* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)

* RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0.0)

Most RSS feeds today are of the 2.0 permutation. And actually all RSS and its permutations are based upon “push technology” which began to be seriously developed a few years ago.

2. RSS is based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) which is actually become incredibly popular in the development of web pages and the like. (For now we will not enter too many technicalities in programming)

3. PodCasting – is a derivation of RSS where audio is pushed to the computer instead of just text.

4. VodCasting – is a derivation of RSS where video is pushed to the computer instead of just text.

5. There are also PictureCasting, screencasting… and I guess you are getting the picture.

6. Atom Feeds – This basically is a new syndication to replace RSS format. Whether or not it will work is up to the developers and users.

7. Blogs, (a term which originally came from “weblog”) which has been all the rage in the internet lately, make extensive use of RSS feeds, pushing the information contained in the millions of weblogs out to users.

So what is so great about RSS? It simply is a way of those who have content, say a newspaper, where news changes and is updated on an hourly or daily basis, to push this news to users all over the world without them logging into the web site. The user has an “RSS Reader” (many different types are available – future article) and this news is updated automatically in the Reader on a schedule the user chooses. Thus one can be working without the need to constantly check a news web site, and still keep abrest of any news that is happening “out in the big world”.

Readers can handle many RSS feeds together, and it takes just a glance over to determine if something you are interested in comes through.

Why do web sites and companies do this? Because it creates customer loyalty. It is another avenue of being constantly connected with the customers and viewers of their web sites. It is a way to keep the people coming back and back again.

In the next article of this series I will discuss the method by which a feed is created and then pushed out to the Net world at large for others to read it.

Copyright © 2005 Ted W. Gross. All rights reserved. (You may publish this article in its entirety with the following author’s information with live links only.)

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Discover an incredible software program, that rapidly builds targeted Web traffic for you.

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