You Need RSS, Atom and ROR Codes on Your Website!

What is RSS?

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 22:56:00 +0000

What is RSS?

RSS is technology used to monitor rapidly changing information on the web in an organized and user friendly way.

RSS Feed Readers search the internet like a giant orange radar.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding the little orange and white RSS icon that is found all over the world on news and blog sites. People find it odd that when you click on it, you're taken to a webpage that looks unfinished. Did the website designers forget to do something here? In fact the opposite is true. Putting that little orange symbol on a webpage is the final touch in making website information available to everyone as soon as it is put on the internet. The strange webpage you are taken to is written in what's called XML code. XML is a special set of instructions to an RSS feed reader that tell it when the information for that particular webpage has changed or been updated. People who visit a webpage often for "up to the minute" information use this amazing technology to bring them the

Rich Site Summary

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary and it is not limited to monitoring news sites. It also allows a user to monitor blogs, Twitter or Facebook pages, financial information, daily deals, classified sites, and government alerts to name just a few. By posting a "feed" on their page, web site owners allow rss readers to search their site to continuously look for fresh and new information all the while maintaining user privacy.

Sample Feed Button

RSS is what brings new news to your attention.

RSS aggregators work in any language and reach every country around the globe. If you click on the recognizable icon found all over internet sites and see an screen your browser can't digest, copy and past the URL into your RSS feed reader. If you want to be an RSS subscriber, download an RSS feed reader by doing a Google search for RSS Feed Reader. If you're a web site owner and would like to give your users the freshest information possible download the RSS Creation Tutorial.

RSS History

There are a lot of folk legends about the evolution of RSS. Here's the scoop, the sequence of events in the life of RSS, as told by the designer of most of the formats.

Date	Event
Dec 17, 1997	scriptingNews format, designed by DW at UserLand.
Mar 15, 1999	RSS 0.90, designed by Netscape, for use with my.netscape.com, which also supported scriptingNews format. The only thing about it that was RDF was the header, otherwise it was plain garden-variety XML.
Jul 10, 1999	RSS 0.91, designed by Netscape, spec written by Dan Libby, includes most features from scriptingNews 2.0b1. "We're trying to move towards a more standard format, and to this end we have included several tags from the popular format." The RDF header is gone.
Jul 28, 1999	UserLand adopts RSS 0.91, deprecates scriptingNews formats.
Jul 28, 1999	The RSS team at Netscape evaporates.
Jun 04, 2000	UserLand's RSS 0.91 specification.
Aug 14, 2000	RSS 1.0 published as a proposal, worked on in private by a group led by Rael Dornfest at O'Reilly. Based on RDF and uses namespaces. Most elements of previous formats moved into modules. Like 0.90 it has an RDF header, but otherwise is a brand-new format, not related to any previous format.
Dec 25, 2000	RSS 0.92, which is 0.91 with optional elements, designed by Dave Winer at UserLand.
Apr 20, 2001	RSS 0.93 discussed but never deployed.
Mar 14, 2002	MetaWeblog API merges RSS 0.92 with XML-RPC to provide a powerful blogging API.
Sep 18, 2002	RSS 2.0, which is 0.92 with optional elements, designed by Dave Winer, after leaving UserLand. MetaWeblog API updated for RSS 2.0. While in development, this format was called 0.94.
Jul 15, 2003	RSS 2.0 spec released through Harvard under a Creative Commons license.

2016 Best RSS Apps iPhone iPad Android

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 01:05:00 +0000

Best RSS Reader Apps for iPhone and iPad

If you’re like us, you probably read a lot. A real lot. And if you’re like us again, you probably know that the iPhone/iPad is one of the best ways to follow stuff that’s important to you.

Services like Google Reader have made it easy to keep a track on all your favorite websites and blogs. All those tags and folders have made it even more easier to segregate stuff and not miss reading the important ones.

Interestingly, the iPhone offers a plethora of options when it comes to RSS readers. Over the years, we’ve used a few of them, gotten tired of a few, fallen in love with some and of course, are strongly passionate about the whole thing.

Best Free RSS reader apps for iPhone and iPad

#1. Free RSS Reader

Are you always excited to know what’s going on around you? Want to get the latest news of technology and gadgets on your fingertips? Then, try Free RSS Reader app on your iOS device. The websites or blogs supporting RSS feed can be used in this app. Once you follow them via RSS feed, you are sure to get the best news and blogs on your fingertips. You can easily open the links through the in-built app browser. Share the content with your friends via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn just with a touch!

Download RSS Reader

#2. Newsify

Newsify app does lot more besides just providing RSS feed option on your iOS device. When you install this app, you can read the contents offline once you open them and that’s with image caching so you never miss the any important image. You can set notifications whenever you receive the new articles. Make your own library and sync it with iCloud to read the articles on all your devices. You can also add custom feed URLs to get more of news around the globe.

Download Newsify

#3. Byline

Byline comes as a simple, elegant and minimal RSS reader for theiPhone and iPad. The ad-supported version comes as a free appwhile an in-app purchase ($2.99) removes the ads. Byline supports offline reading: something that we all need a lot. It syncs with yourGoogle Reader account and has a support of the offline feature for over 2000 entries. Besides, the built-in browser makes it very comfy.

Download Byline

#4. Feeddler

Feeddler is one of the best RSS readers ever built. It’s got features that would take us ages to find them all; they’re quite powerful too. Offline reading, check. Gesture based controls, check. Full-screen browsing, check. UI customization like night-mode, check. Basically, almost everything you’d want from an RSS reader that usually comes with a price tag; only, in the case of Feeddler, it’s free.

Download Feeddler

#5. Feedly

Feedly is a curious mixture of Flipboard and Google Reader; you get to follow your subscriptions as well as read curated content from across the best sources on the web. The best thing about Feedly is its design: being a design fanatic, Feedly impressed me. It’s a stunning piece of an app that will really take your breath away. And it’s designed to be awesome.

Download Feedly

#6. Flipboard

An RSS Reader app that’s a must-have on every iPhone/iPad/Android users’ gadget, Flipboard stands as one of the best ever apps built to keep tabs on your RSS subscriptions. Flipboard, in my opinion, has no competition: it’s beyond amazing.

Download Flipboard

What is your favorite RSS reader iPhone app?

Jignesh Padhiyar

http://www.igeeksblog.com

Jignesh Padhiyar is founder of iGeeksBlog.com who has a keen eye for news, rumors and all the unusual stuff that happens around iPhone and iPad.

RSS Really Simple Syndication News - Apps 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:57:00 +0000

The 10 Best Feed Reader Apps for RSS, News, and More

VICKY CASSIDY | Sep. 22, 2015

The internet is overloaded with content. Even if you only set out to read the most important articles and watch the top videos, you'll never get done.

Just staying up-to-date and informed is a challenge. You have news to read, blogs to check, and YouTube hits you've got to watch. But instead of opening each site a half-dozen times a day, you can use an RSS app to curate your content automatically.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a file that most websites update with their newest blog posts, videos, deals and more, so you can "subscribe" to sites and have new content automatically pushed to you. Instead of checking the 40 websites you follow, you can just open an RSS reader app and see what's new on all of those sites together.

There are dozens of ways to follow sites and keep up with news, so we uncovered the very best RSS feed reader apps. Whether you want a simple app for consuming news on the go, or a powerful tool that archives the best content from hundreds of sites, there's an app here for you.
The Best RSS Reader Apps

For over a decade, Google Reader was the gold standard for RSS apps. That is, until July 2013, when Google abruptly stopped supporting the tool to focus on other products. The internet let out a collective groan.

Suddenly RSS readers were popular again, with hundreds of apps competing for Google Reader's former users on sites like ReplaceReader. Today, many of these apps are polished, high-quality feed readers that are a great tool for following your favorite sites.

At their core, RSS reader apps let you subscribe to content from your favorite sites. Typically, they'll download images and text from articles so you can read them offline, and will list all of the stories in chronological order. Many RSS apps then include tools to discover sites based on your favorite topics, and let you save favorite articles to reference later.

There's two main types of RSS readers: online RSS services, and native RSS apps. The former run automatically in the background, finding new articles as soon as they're published. You can read your articles online, or typically sync them with apps for your phone or computer—either made by the RSS service, or from third-party developers. Then, native RSS apps sync RSS feeds directly on your device and often work with popular RSS services.

Here are a few of the better apps related to RSS feeds and services:

Feedly Building a personalized newsfeed Free; $5.41/mo. Web, iOS, Android
Feedbin Advanced search $3/mo. Web
NewsBlur Predictive article filtering Free; $2/mo. Web, iOS, Android

Feed Wrangler

Advanced feed organization $1.60/mo. Web, iOS

Inoreader Long term content archiving Free; $1.25+/mo. Web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone
Fever Surfacing most popular content $30 Self-hosted
Selfoss Customizing your RSS reader Free Self-hosted

When Google announced that Google Reader was being discontinued, Feedlygained 3 million new users in less than a month. It's not hard to see why Feedly is popular—its clean and simple interface is a perfect solution for the casual reader who wants to see all of their websites in one place.

Feedly is designed to be a simple way to build your own newsfeed about your favorite topics. Just search for a favorite site's name to follow it, or lookup a topic to follow related stories. Feedly also curates "starter kits" of content focused around a certain topic, which can be a great way to discover new websites. You can group your favorite sites and topics into "collections," add custom tags or mark an article to "save for later." These and other features make it easy to curate the best articles in your personal newsfeed.

Feedly integrates with most social media apps, so sharing interesting things you find is simple. If you upgrade to the Pro version for about $5 a month, you’ll get extra features like keyword-based search and automatic backups to Dropbox.

Feedly Price: Free; from $65/year Pro plan for faster sync, third-party integrations, backup and more

For a deeper look at Feedly's features and pricing, check out our Feedly review.

See Feedly integrations on Zapier

Feedbin (Web)

Best for: Advanced search

Another very popular RSS app is Feedbin. Once you’ve subscribed to your favorite sites, you can use Feedbin’s tagging system to organize your content into categories. Reading content on Feedbin is a breeze—the interface is nicely designed and allows for distraction-free reading (think Pocket with built-in feeds). Feedbin integrates with many popular Read Later and social media apps, and also allows you to add custom sharing services if your favorite tool isn't supported.

Feedbin's killer feature is search. Not only can you search all your content by keyword, but you can also save search criteria. That way, you can set up a dynamic folder that gives you a quick overview of a specific topic. Feedbin even creates a saved search API, in case you want to do something more with the data than just view it in the reader.

Feedbin Price: $3/month

NewsBlur (Web, iOS, Android)

Best for: Predictive article filtering

Like the first two apps, NewsBlur allows you to subscribe to different sites and organize your content into folders. Its reading modes, though, let you switch between a simplified article view or an original view that shows the source website right in your feed reader.

NewsBlur's most interesting feature is its sophisticated filtering, which can automatically highlight or hide stories based on certain criteria. If you spend some time "training" your filters, the system will learn your preferences and try to surface the stories that interest you most. That way, you can subscribe to as many sites as you want, and still only see the content you're interested in.

NewsBlur also lets you share your favorite stories, either on social networks or inside of NewsBlur. Within the app, you can add stories that you read and like to your personal "blurblog," or find people with similar interests and follow their blurblogs as well.

NewsBlur Price: Free for subscribing to 64 sites; $24/year Premium account for unlimited sites, saved searches, and more; free open-source to run on your own server

Feed Wrangler (Web, iOS)

Best for: Advanced feed organization

Feed Wrangler’s goal is to help you "wrangle" the news. It's a distraction-free reader—boasting perhaps the cleanest interface in this list—that makes managing feeds simple. You can follow your favorite sites, and even use its beta podcast stream to listen to podcasts.

Your website and podcast subscriptions are organized into "streams." Streams can be simple: you can create a stream and assign different subscriptions to it. Or, you can build advanced streams by applying topic-based search criteria to your feed. If you're overwhelmed by content, Feed Wrangler can clean things up and empty out your reading queue.

Because Feed Wrangler is focused on reading, it doesn’t have social media integrations. It does, however, allow you to move articles you don’t have time to read to Instapaper, Pocket, or Pinboard with a single click—perfect for saving the best for later.

Feed Wrangler Price: $19/year

Inoreader (Web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone)

Best for: Long-term content archiving

Not sure where to start with RSS feeds? Inoreader’s "Discovery Mode" can help you find and follow specific topics and trending items. To stay organized, you can group your feeds in folders and use tags to separate out individual articles as you read them. Similar to Feed Wrangler, you can write more advanced rules to automatically sort content, too.

Inoreader allows you to subscribe to Twitter and Google+ users or searches, giving you one app for all of your online reading needs. You can then share your favorite articles on social networks or broadcast them within Inoreader, which shares your favorite content with your followers.

While most RSS apps only cache content for the short-term, Inoreader doesn’t have limited time archives: Your content—even the stuff you’ve already read—is stored permanently.

Inoreader Price: Free with ads; from $14.99/year Starter Plan for ad-free reading with customizable dashboard

Fever (Self-Hosted Web)

Best for: Surfacing the most popular content

The beauty of hosted applications is that they’re easy to set up and use—simply sign up for the app and you’re ready to get started. The bad news is that you don’t own your data, and if the company decides to close up shop (like Google Reader did in 2013) you'll have to start over again.

To avoid these potential problems, you can choose a self-hosted RSS app—a reader that runs on your own server. They're more trouble to set up, but once they're running, they'll work much like the apps above. And most importantly: the data is yours.

One of the most popular self-hosted RSS apps is Fever. It's a standard RSS reader, with folders to organize your feeds and a simplified reading view. Once you've added your favorite sites, Fever's goal is to "take the temperature" of your RSS feeds and highlight popular content—the more content you subscribe to, the better it works.

You can indicate which feeds are essential (Fever calls these feeds "kindling") and which feeds are less important ("sparks"). The app shows you all of your Kindling articles, then use the Sparks to figure out which topics are most important—even on sites you're not subscribed to. It'll then give you a "hot" list of the most important articles to read.

Fever Price: $30 one-time fee

Selfoss (Self-hosted Web)

Best for: Customizing your RSS reader

Selfoss is another self-hosted RSS option that lets you follow sites and your favorite people on Twitter in one app. Like many of the other RSS apps so far, it simplifies the reading experience and has some basic features that help you organize your feeds.

Selfoss is open source, so you can download it for free, dig into its code, and customize things if you'd like. You can add additional data sources, build plugins to add extra features, and download pre-made extras from its community. It'll take a bit more work to start using, but will let you make a feed reader that's tailored to your needs.

Selfoss Price: Free open-source
Other Great Hosted RSS Reader Services

AppIcon: Best for:PricePlatform
The Old Reader Called "the ultimate social reader", The Old Reader lets you follow others and see their favorite sites and articles—much like Google Reader did. Free; $3/mo. Premium Web
BazQux Reader Keep up with RSS feeds and the comments on articles, along with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ updates in the same app. $19/year Web
Digg Reader The original social news site, Digg's new Reader service is a full-featured RSS reader that lets you subscribe to your favorite sites right alongside the best content Digg's recommending today. Free Web, iOS
Netvibes Follow your RSS feeds, keep track of the weather and stock prices, and much, much more in Netvibes' "Dashboard of Things" that puts everything in one at-a-glance place. Free; $2+/mo.Premium Web, iOS
FlowReader Read your feeds along with your full Facebook and Twitter timelines in one app—then share the best content you find everywhere to Buffer, Tumblr, and more. Free Web, iOS, Android
Feedreader One of the original PC RSS readers, Feedreader now has a new online RSS reader app—along with tools to help you discover great RSS feeds. You could use it to browse today's top stories, without even setting up an account. Free Web
FreshRSS Have your own server? FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS reader that looks very similar to the original Google Reader. Browse feeds by date, and sync over 100k articles without trouble. Freeopen-source Self-hosted Web
Tiny Tiny RSS Want to tweak your RSS reader? Tiny Tiny RSS is a self-hosted tool with plugins and themes so you can customize it like you want. It also supports podcast feeds, and lets you share your favorite articles inside Tiny Tiny RSS. Freeopen source Self-hosted Web, Android

The Best Native RSS Reader Apps

Many of the best hosted RSS services include apps for your phone, but if you want offline access to your feeds on a Mac or PC, you'll often need to look for another app. Native RSS reader apps are often more powerful and customizable. You can set them to sync as often as you'd like, tweak their interface, and get notified as soon as a new story comes in.

Here are a few of the most popular options (and if you don't find one you like, be sure to check your computer's App Store for other options).

AppIcon: Best for:PricePlatform
Newsbar A news ticker on the side of your screen $4.99 Mac, iOS
ReadKit Syncing multiple RSS and Reading Services $4.99 Mac
RSSowl Automated actions and organization Free Windows, Linux, Mac

Newsbar (Mac, iOS)

Best for: A news ticker on the side of your screen

Ever wished you could get a news ticker on your computer like the ones on the bottom of TV news stations? Newsbar does the trick. Install it and add in your favorite feeds, and Newsbar will show the latest headlines on the side of your Mac's desktop (or in a dedicated app on your iPhone).

As you're browsing the latest headlines, you can hover over an interesting article to see the entire post. Or, you can hide Newsbar and set up notifications for keywords, and Newsbar will let you know whenever an article comes in about your most important topics. It's a simpler way to follow RSS feeds, one that'll make sure you always know what's happening.

Newsbar Price: $4.99 for Mac; $3.99 for iOS

ReadKit (Mac)

Best for: Syncing multiple RSS and Reading Services

Want a powerful RSS reader that always has an article queued up for you?ReadKit is a popular Mac RSS reader app that can sync feeds on its own, but also integrates with the most popular RSS services and reading later tools. It can sync your Feedly, NewsBlur, Feed Wrangler, Feedbin or Fever feeds to your desktop, as well as the articles you've saved to Instapaper and Pocket.

ReadKit has sophisticated search and sort capabilities, allowing you to build custom rules to move articles into the right folders. You can also customize your reading experience with themes and typefaces, and store articles offline so you'll have something to read even when the internet is down.

ReadKit Price: $4.99; 14-day trial available

RSSOwl (Mac, Windows, Linux)

Best for: Automated actions and organization

For a more utilitarian approach, RSSOwl is another desktop RSS app that's extremely customizable. It syncs RSS feeds on its own, so you can keep a local database on your computer of your favorite articles.

Then, you can drill into them with its search capabilities. Within the search engine, you can use logic expressions to look at anything in an article. Searches can be saved to create dynamic feeds to find future articles, and you can even automate actions to send an alert if certain criteria are met using the "News Filter" feature. If you want to save an article, you can move it to the archive folder or use the "News Bin" feature to organize your saved content.

RSSOwl Price: Free, donation supported
Other Great Native RSS Reader Apps

AppIcon: Best for:PricePlatform
FeedDemon The first RSS app for so many, FeedDemon was one of the most popular feed readers on PCs for years. Google Reader's death hit it hard, though, and so while you can still download it for free it's not currently maintained. It still works—but likely won't forever. Free Windows
NetNewsWire After a long hiatus, the Mac companion to FeedDemon has finally returned with a brand new set of apps and its own sync service. You can open articles in multiple tabs, get started quickly with recommended sites, and sync feeds on your iPhone and Mac without paying for a hosted service. $9.99 Mac; $3.99 iOS Mac, iOS
Press Press is a flexible RSS reader for Android that syncs with Feedly, Feedbin, Feed Wrangler, and Fever. It uses Readability to make articles easy to read, and hides most of its interface so you can focus on the content. $2.99 Android
Reader+ For a simple way to get the news on your Android tablet, Reader+ is one of the most popular options. It can sync RSS feeds on its own or with Feedly, caches your articles for offline reading, and even supports listening to podcast feeds. $1.99 Android
Pulp Want to turn your feeds into a newspaper? Pulp's the RSS reader for you. It pulls out images from your RSS feed, stylizes the intro paragraphs, and makes your daily news look like a virtual newspaper on your Mac or iPad. $9.99 Mac; $4.99 iPad Mac, iOS
Reeder Another RSS reader app that syncs with nearly every popular service, Reeder was one of the original popular RSS apps for iOS. It's polished, and uses gestures to switch between services and reading modes. $9.99 Mac; $4.99 iOS Mac, iOS

Build Your Own RSS Reader with Zapier

It seems like there should be an RSS app for everyone. But if you're struggling to find the perfect tool, don't forget about Zapier.

Perhaps you just want to make sure you see the latest articles from your favorite sites, but don't necessarily want a new app to keep track of them. Or maybe you need a more robust way to log every article published. Zapier's RSS integrations can help, giving you a simple way to subscribe to RSS feeds.

Share new RSS items in Slack
Use this Zap

Get Push Notifications Whenever Your Favorite Sites are Updated
Use this Zap

Be Alerted via Email of New RSS Feed Items
Use this Zap

Log RSS feed updates as new rows in Google Sheets
Use this Zap
See more RSS by Zapier integrations powered byZapier

Or maybe your favorite apps and sites don't include RSS feeds. Zapier can help turn almost any app's notifications into an RSS feed.

Get an RSS Feed of All New Files in Your Dropbox
Use this Zap

Add new Facebook Pages posts to an RSS feed
Use this Zap

Add new RSS posts via email
Use this Zap

Create an RSS feed of new articles in a Feedly category
Use this Zap
See more RSS by Zapier integrations powered byZapier

Alternately, you can use Zapier to make your own customized RSS feed—one with filters so you'll only see the articles you want to read. Be sure to experiment, and you'll find new ways to make your RSS reader even more powerful.

RSS is one of the oldest parts of the internet, but even in today's social media-addicted world it's still useful. It's one of the best ways to make sure you seeeverything your favorite sites publish, and never miss out on that amazing Craigslist deal.

If you're just getting started using RSS, try picking an app that's simple to use. Add its extension to your browser and subscribe to favorite sites, then you'll start looking out for RSS feeds everywhere. Power users—those still mourning Google Reader—should consider which features they need most and find an app that matches their need.

From unique organization tools to simple reading experiences, there's an RSS reader for everyone. We'd love to hear why you picked your RSS reader in the comments below!

Struggling to read everything your RSS reader sends your way? Now it's time to pick a read it later and bookmarking tool to save the best content.

“If we didn't get these ongoing notifications through Zapier, we’d miss important information on how patient funding is going. It's saved us so much time.”

Grace Garey, co-founder of Watsi Try Zapier Today

About the Author

Vicky Cassidy is a productivity consultant for small businesses from Madison, Wisconsin. When she's not putting things in the most logical order, you can find her in the kitchen working on her food blog.

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noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 00:47:00 +0000

Are Websites

to Become Obsolete?

By Tina Courtney-Brown in Business Featured

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During every cycle of technological growth, someone declares an aspect of our daily culture “dead.” SEO, print media, blogging – even the internet itself – they’ve all been tapped for extinction. Yet we still have newspapers to read, we still have search engines to please, and blogs now number over 152 million.

This does not, however, negate the sentiment that some (or even all) of these mainstays are on their way out. If you think of death more as a transformation into something new, then print media is definitely experiencing that process. As is SEO, blogs, infographics, and even the mighty website itself.

It’s an obvious truth that websites as we know them are a thing of the past. They are evolving out of necessity, and in a sense, into utter oblivion. Why? Because that’s simply the nature of technology; it’s anything but static. And if your website is static, it’s an endangered species.

Why Websites Must Evolve or Die

Think about a typical website, say circa 2005. It’s a hub of information, yes, but a pretty flat and stagnant hub. Sites in this vain trying to compete in today’s marketplace have an insurmountable challenge. Look at dynamo apps like Flipboard and Facebook’s Paper. They are alive, by comparison; bursting with images and media, multifaceted, and far more engaging. Even the most successful blogs, updated daily, can’t compete with this kind of freshness and relevancy.

Technology is central to our lives because it flows at the pace of human evolution. Things that are static will always fall away, because life requires energy and movement. If you’re finding yourself stuck in the evolution of your business, take a look at your reliance on static pages and information. Remember that the internet in many ways mirrors the methods of our minds. It’s always firing, also sending new information. The most successful examples of online media these days matches that vibrancy.

How Social Media Breaks the Mold

Sites like Twitter and Facebook are not traditional websites because every second spent on either brings about a new experience. They are the polar opposite of static media, with streams of data and information available every nanosecond.

Furthermore, social media is insanely popular because it is highly customizable. If you were inundated with every tweet and status update, social media would cease to be relevant. Because you can choose whose information you are presented, it’s tailored to your liking, and engenders immense loyalty.

Is it any wonder why Google is fervently pushing folks to Google+? They understand the evolution taking place. We as business owners should too.

Consider a dynamic feed like Twitter’s juxtaposed with a static website. On the former, you could get lost for hours consuming fascinating details. On the latter, you’ll get the entire download in just a few minutes, and be ready to move on.

Companies that still cling to the notion that singing their own praises will amuse the masses are already finding success is fleeting. Given the choice between an ever-changing flow of excitement and a self-centric diatribe full of hard sells, it’s easy to see why social media is spelling death to the static website.

Adapting Your Online Business to the New Paradigm

If you want to think like a trendsetter, reevaluate your business with an eye to a new presence. The old way looked like this: build a website, do everything possible to make search engines rank you, launch numerous marketing campaigns, and essentially work your tail off trying to get attention. The problem is, consumers aren’t all looking for your services like this anymore.

The new game in town is found in the ever-present flow of dynamic media. If you want to compete with any sense of longevity, engage your future customers into a dialogue first. Hook them into your sphere by providing multiple channels of relevant, unique, and quality content offerings. Use social media to have a daily stream of industry-related blasts, creative reveals, and various other ways of joining them in the daily flow. In other words, meet them where they are at, with information they actually want to consume.

Websites of yesteryear are like stop signs now. They’re always there, espousing the same information. And they’re expecting users to find them. It’s your job to find your audience, and to do so in a manner that matches their day to day behaviors. It’s your job to offer your audience things with tangible value before they become your customers.

The Good News and the Bad News

The more challenging aspect of this new stream-like way of marketing is obvious: it’s new, it’s different, and it requires more effort out of the gate. But the really, really good news is that the customers you do retain through this method are likely to remain fiercely loyal, if you provide a good product and service. Marketers in the modern age have to, in essence, romance their future customers. Once you do so with integrity, people are likely to keep coming back, because an actual relationship is formed.

In many ways, this is bringing more honesty to marketing. Since we really do have to work harder and harder to acquire new customers, we need to make darn sure we never take them for granted. Follow-through is as essential as the initial content offerings – all these pieces create the perfect company model. Balance is integral.

The sooner you dive into the new paradigm, the more likely your business will thrive. Change is always inevitable, and the true success stories are those who dared to shift focus before mass consciousness caught up. There’s still time to be an early adopter – step one is evolving your dying static website.

What are some key creative ways you’ve already evolved your online presence?

Digital producer, online marketer, community manager, and multi-faceted writer Tina Courtney-Brown has been managing cross-functional teams for online businesses since 1996. Tina has assisted many clients in maximizing online production and marketing efforts, and is a staff writer for SiteProNews, one of the Web’s foremost webmaster and tech news blogs. She’s produced and marketed innovative content for major players like Disney and JDate, as well as boutique startups galore, with fortes including social media, SEO, massively multiplayer games, community management, social networks, and project management. Tina is also a certified Reiki practitioner, herbalist, nonprofit director and spiritual counselor. Learn more at her personal website, or find her on Facebook and Google+.

5 Ways Twitter Is Making RSS Obsolete

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 00:43:00 +0000

5 Ways Twitter Is Making RSS Obsolete

http://blog.protocol80.com/2011/01/26/5-ways-twitter-is-making-rss-obsolete/

Be honest here: do you subscribe to RSS feeds? More importantly, if you do subscribe to RSS feeds, do you actively monitor them and read the content posted to them or do you ignore it or forget to look? It’s no secret that a lot of news stories are being broken on Twitter before they’re seen anywhere else in today’s news stream, and as a result more folks are turning to the ever-popular social website not just to communicate, but to learn. Here are three reasons that Twitter is becoming the one-stop shop to get your news, and why RSS is becoming less-important to mere mortals.

A Level Playing Field

Let’s say you’re the biggest Shaquille O’Neal fan in the world. Would you rather read an RSS feed from a Shaq fan site or follow him on Twitter so you can hear all of the developments in his career first-hand? Alright now let’s take into consideration the fact that Twitter lets you actually interact with Shaq. Sounds like a fan’s dream come true, right?

Much like blogging before it, Twitter provides a level playing field that gives everyone the same opportunity to interact and contribute to the community. Moreover it cuts out the middle man so that you can follow industry leaders directly rather than going through a third-party source, and the same is true for your potential customers. Let’s take the Shaq example above and change it to your favorite brand – now customers can not only receive updates and support for the products and services they love but they can communicate and interact with people who work for the company directly. If you’re marketing the opportunity is pretty obvious.

Social Curation

Twitter is all about following people who post content you like, and as a result you have an extra layer of curation that RSS can’t provide. If I subscribe to my favorite tech news website’s RSS feed I’ve opened up my floodgates to all of their content. Whether I’m interested or not, each story they send out over their feed will need to be reviewed so that I can pick out headlines I like.

On Twitter, because I’m following people who post news and content I enjoy, I’m more likely to be exposed to relevant information. More importantly there’s an added opportunity to discover new things on Twitter. If I’m following Donny and he posts something I haven’t seen before I’m more likely to follow through because I know we like similar things. On the other hand, if a foreign news story comes through my Engadget feed that doesn’t seem interesting it gets skipped 9 times out of 10.

Instant Access

As the mobile device market continues to explode more people are turning to the phone in their pocket to not only consume but produce news. The reason news breaks on Twitter first is because it’s so accessible and viral. With a mobile phone connected to Twitter we effectively all become news reporters. See something cool on your way to work? Snap a twitpic and send it to Twitter – a few retweets later and your own personal news story has gone viral.

I don’t care how good your favorite news website is, they can’t compete with 100 million independent journalists giving first-hand coverage of the events in their everyday lives, and even if they could, by the time a story was edited and posted to their site for your RSS reader to pull down it would have already broken 1,000 times via Twitter’s unfiltered news stream.

People Like Interaction

RSS feeds are a one-way street. I subscribe and then content gets delivered to me, and I can choose to partake or not. In some cases I can click through to a blog post, sign into the website from which the feed originated, and finally leave a comment but that functionality is not inherent to RSS itself.

The whole point of Twitter is to communicate. If someone posts a cool article I can very quickly retweet it to pass it along to friends or send an @ reply to give feedback to the author. In the end Twitter promotes communication and gives businesses an opportunity to build relationships with their prospect clients and customers.

Universal Adoption

Finally, Twitter is cool, modern and is becoming a standard medium for businesses and consumers to interact. When was the last time you heard or saw a company plug their RSS feed on a radio broadcast or TV commercial? It doesn’t happen. RSS is too complicated to quickly explain in short order. On the other hand everyone understands what a social network is and roughly how it works.

If your blog or website has an RSS feed but you’re not on Twitter you’re missing the boat! Ask your everyday customer if they subscribe to your RSS feed or if they even know what an RSS feed is. You’ll probably get a blank stare. Now ask the same about Twitter. Chances are very good they’ve at least heard of it or know someone who uses it if they don’t already themselves. If people are already on Twitter your small business should be too!

I certainly don’t think RSS is dead except for as a primary means for news aggregation. It still serves a useful purpose on the back end of websites so develops can display information, and it’s still a great way to subscribe to certain kinds of content like podcasts. That said even the geekiest folks I know are starting to turn to Twitter to see what’s going on with their topics of interest instead of an RSS reader.

Will Facebook RSS Replace Google Reader?

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 20:24:00 +0000

Will Facebook RSS Replace Google Reader?

A few weeks back, I spotted mentions of RSS feeds in Facebook’s code. With the closure of Google Reader at the end of the month, Facebook could be a new place to keep up-to-date with content from around the web.

Facebook schemas list all the types on content and the connections between them. Users have photos, photos might have a place and so on.

A new entry appeared - now users have RSS feeds, each RSS feed has multiple entries, and a list of subscribers. What’s surprising is that the code mentions RSS specifically, and distinctly from existing interest lists and friend lists. Also, note that this is unconnected to Facebook outputtingRSS feeds, which they’ve done for a while.

I’ve tried to access RSS feeds through the API, but it’s currently locked down, and only available to whitelisted apps.

Facebook could make a great RSS reader, and I’d hope something gets launched before Google finally pulls the plug on Reader.

Update: Facebook have removed rssfeed and rssentry details from the schema.

Publishing RSS and ATOM Feeds using WCF 3.5 Syndication Libraries

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:55:00 +0000

By Adnan Masood | 5 Feb 2008 | Unedited contribution
The Code Project

Introduction

Windows Communication Foundation with its 3.5 release provides several new and useful features including capability to publish and consume syndication feeds in a much easier and uniform way, right out of the box. This article focuses on using the WCF 3.5 libraries namely System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace to create and publish an RSS and Atom feed from the same code base.
Background

Syndication feeds are data formats to provide users with contents which updates frequently without them having to visit the corresponding websites individually. Atom and RSS are two popular syndication formats. This feature helps readers to keep up to date with their favorite websites in an automated fashion instead of checking each of them manually. This method of syndication is quite popular with blogs, news headlines and podcast to name a few content providers.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a popular web feed format containing either the summary or full text of associated contents. Another format for web feeds is Atom which differentiates itself in terms of content model, date Format, internationalization and modularity from RSS. Details of these formats and their comparison are beyond the scope of this writing but it can be found on the links citied in the reference section.

As we’ve established above, RSS and Atom are suitable for more content oriented entities and therefore it raises an important question of why do we need web feed support in a connected application development framework like WCF? The answer lies in one word, REST (Representational State Transfer). Briefly speaking, by introducing the webHttpBinding and UriTemplates, Microsoft has depicted their interest and paradigm shift towards the Web 2.0 model of REST style services. Asp.NET MVC framework is also closely tied with the REST style development. The Syndication support is among the core component supporting the big plan which constitutes of

Web feeds get parameterized and treated as a service.
The request and response over HTTP-GET is based on standard web feeds format, utilized by a wide variety of aggregators.
Underlying WCF libraries provide built in support for UriTemplate parsing and hence leveraging the “hole in the Uri” pattern over HTTP-GET for service invocation.
WCF 3.5 provides built in syndication support for standardized web feed format responses hence supporting parameterized Uri over multiple end points.

An example which follows shortly will clarify the above mention points.
System.ServiceModel.Syndication Namespace

System.ServiceModel is the new namespace provided with WCF 3.0 and now with WCF 3.5, Microsoft has added few more namespaces to it and ServiceModel.Syndication namespace is one of them.

Some of the prominent classes of System.ServiceModel.Syndication are as follows.

Class

Description

Atom10FeedFormatter

(De)Serializes a SyndicationFeed instance in Atom 1.0 format.

Rss20FeedFormatter

(De)Serializes a SyndicationFeed instance in RSS 2.0 format.

SyndicationContent

Base class for representation of syndication content.

SyndicationFeed

Represents a top-level feed object both in Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0.

SyndicationFeedFormatter

Abstract class serving as base class for formatters (Atom10FeedFormatter, Rss20FeedFormatter).

SyndicationItem

Represents a feed item, for example an RSS or an Atom.

TextSyndicationContent

Represents any SyndicationItem content intended to be displayed to an end user.

UrlSyndicationContent

Represents syndication content that consists of a URL to another resource.

XmlSyndicationContent

Represents XML syndication content which is not intended to be displayed in a browser.

For the rest of this enlightening article, please click on the link for this blog post's title above.

ROME in a Day: Parse and Publish Feeds in Java

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 23:34:00 +0000

O'Reilly XML.com

By Mark Woodman

February 22, 2006

Ready to parse and publish RSS and Atom feeds in Java? In this step-by-step tutorial, we'll show you how to pull in an existing feed, add your own content, and publish the results in a new format, all in 100 lines of code. (200 lines with whitespace and comments.)
Knowing that RSS and Atom feeds are "just" XML, you might think that parsing and creating syndicated feeds in Java should be a snap. Pick any one type of RSS, and you might be right. Unfortunately, there are at least ten flavors of RSS and Atom out there: RSS 0.90, RSS 0.91 Netscape, RSS 0.91 Userland, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.94, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, and the newest addition to the bunch, Atom 1.0. Then there are all the namespace modules, like Dublin Core, Media, and so on. It's all messy enough to make a grown programmer cry. Wipe those tears, Java developers, and say hello to ROME.

When in ROME

In this tutorial, we'll be using ROME to do all the heavy lifting. ROME is an open source (Apache licensed) Java library which is designed to make it easy for you to parse and create syndicated feeds, regardless of format. In fact, all of the variants of RSS and Atom mentioned earlier are supported by ROME.ROME doesn't just come with features, it also has a proven track record on sites like My AOL, CNET Networks, and Edmunds.com. The Powered By ROME wiki page describes how ROME is being used in these and other applications.
The basic approach of ROME is to parse any RSS or Atom feed item into a canonical bean interface. This lets you as a developer manage fairly homogeneous item beans regardless of their original format. Even better, ROME makes it easy to create a new RSS or Atom feed, using those very same beans. This tutorial is going to show you how to do just that.
(To read the rest of this article, please click on the link in this blog post's title above.)

Create RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 in Asp.Net 3.5 C#

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:31:00 +0000

March 14, 2010
Deepu MI's Blog

In this article I am going to explain how we can create web syndications like RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 in Asp.Net and C# with very minimal code.

RSS 2.0
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is one of the syndication feed formats which can get the frequently updated content from the web site. (Refer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS).
The specification of RSS format http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html. RSS is most widely used syndication format.

Atom 1.0
Atom is a syndication format which is more flexible than RSS. Atom came into existence out of a need to improve RSS. (Refer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_standardard)

In Asp.Net 3.5 frame work we can create subscription feeds with very minimal code using System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace which contains all of the classes that make up the Syndication Object Model. For example below is a sample Blog class I am defining a public method and some properties to retrieve the blog items (I have hardcoded two items you can replace this from your database logic).

The next step I am going to create another class called Syndication Helper which converts our web content to syndication format.

Code Explanation

Uri uri = new Uri(“http://deepumi.wordpress.com”);

Configure your site url ( blog or news).

SyndicationFeed syndicationFeed = new SyndicationFeed();
Syndicaiton Feed class represent a top level of feed object, (you can add your blog name / site name with description and the last blog/site updated time).

List items = new List();
Syndication Item class represent a individual feed atom/rss.item object like item url, item description, item id, last updated etc. Here I am creating a syndicaiton item collection object which mapping from MyBlogList() method.

List oBlogList = Blog.GetMyBlogList();
foreach (Blog oBlog in oBlogList)
{
SyndicationItem oItem = new SyndicationItem(oBlog.Title,
SyndicationContent.CreateHtmlContent(oBlog.Description),
new Uri(oBlog.Url),
oBlog.BlogId.ToString(),
oBlog.LastUpdated);
items.Add(oItem);
}

Finally you are return the SyndicationFeed object to the aspx pages.
Now we need to render the atom and rss content in the aspx pages.

Create a new aspx page called rss.aspx and make sure there is no html markup in the page(just a blank page)

Code behind (RSS page)

Create a new aspx page called rss.aspx and make sure there is no html markup in the page(just a blank page)

Code behind (Atom page)

Hope this help and If you have any comments, please feel free to write your feedback.

You can download the entire article from here or copy paste this URL

http://www.4shared.com/file/240764190/b37e055d/Feeds.html

Thanks
Deepu

Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:04:00 +0000

•Get all of your online content and marketing messages delivered to your receipients. No spam filters, no blacklists, no problems.
•Win back your customers and prospects by finally getting your messages through to them.
•Increase your natural search engine rankings and drive fresh traffic to your website.
•Get your content published on other sites, generating more visitors and exposure for your business.
•Ultimately, use RSS to increase your sales, develop profitable customer relationships and better monetize your online content.
•RSS publishing is easy and using some tools can even be free. You can start using it today without any cost whatsoever!
How Well-Known Marketers and Publishers Are Already Profiting from RSS

•BTI Communications Group: Search Engine Rankings
BTI Communications Group is a small VoIP solutions provider, but using RSS they acheived #1 search engine rankings for their most important keywords, such as voip solution provider on Google. While their larger competitors are investing in search engine campaigns, BTI is achieving top positions for free. They also increased the traffic to their corporate site for 75%.

•Lockergnome.com: Improved Clickthrough Rates
Lockergnome.com, one of the most popular tech sites on the Web today, used to distribute more than 400.000 e-mail newsletters weekly. Today, they have 5 times more RSS subscribers than e-mail subscribers and their RSS clickthrough rates are 500% greater than their e-mail clickthrough rates.

What is RSS?
RSS is a simple to use publishing tool for marketers and publishers, which allows you to easily get your internet content delivered to your subscribers and to other web media.
[to find out more about what RSS is, click here]

Up until now most internet marketing tools could be used only for a specific internet marketing activity (such as direct marketing, search engine marketing, business blogging, internet advertising, digital public relations, e-commerce, ...).

There has never before been a single tool to improve, enhance and power all of them, without prejudice.

But RSS is such a tool. Misunderstood by most marketers, overlooked by many end-users, it has the potential to power the entire internet marketing mix.

How Can RSS be Used by Marketers and Publishers
•Direct marketing
•E-zine publishing
•Public relations
•Monetizing online content
•Customer Relationship Management
•Advertising
•Internal and team communications
•Search engine optimisation
•Lead generation
•Online publishing
•E-commerce
•And much much more ...

"Rok's book is the most comprehensive guide on RSS for marketers. A milestone document that clearly defines the role of RSS in the marketing mix and gives concrete instructions and tips regarding how to best leverage this powerful and game changing capability."

--- Dick Costolo, Feedburner"Rok, What you did is not fair! You've left everyone else nothing more on the subject of RSS to write about.

Now I understand why Pakii calls your book the 'best on the planet' - I agree. It is the most comprehensive, detailed and complete writing on the topic of RSS feed marketing and publishing I've read.

My notebook has tons of notes to myself, made while reading your book - in ONE sitting, lasting just under 4 hours. I simply couldn't stop. There'll be a lot of changes implemented soon on my various RSS feeds, thanks to what I picked up from your guide.

All success,

Dr.Mani Sivasubramanian
Author: How To Profit From RSS Feeds
http://www.RSS-Marketing.com""Hello Rok -

Just a note to say I love your material on RSS. (You have new fan here!) IMO, you do a wonderful job of explaining exactly how RSS can help grow a business . One of your articles several weeks ago prompted me to have a look at your site.

I bought both your "Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS" and the [ competitive print book title removed from the letter ] book. From a marketing-relevant standpoint, your book blows the other out of the water.

Anyway, saw another of your articles come through today and thought I'd drop you a line.

Regards,
Bobette Kyle
http://www.WebSiteMarketingPlan.com
Marketing Plan and Web Promotion Information" Take a Look at Some Quick Examples of How Companies are Already Using RSS ...
•MarketingVOX is using RSS to deliver internet marketing news to their readers as it becomes available. Instead of having to wait to receive all the news in a single e-mail newsletter, RSS users get them as soon as they are ready.

•BTI Communications, a VoIP company achieved #1 search engine positions for their most important keywords in a highly staurated market, only using the power of RSS.

•Amazon.com is using RSS to announce their bestsellers and to help their users keep track of releases they are most interested in.

•Some affiliate managers already communicate with their affiliates using RSS.

•FindSavings.com uses RSS to deliver savings coupons and related information.

•Lockergnome uses RSS to provide visitors with the latest downloads and relevant software. Yet again other companies are using RSS to deliver product updates and patches directly to their customers, just as they become available.

•A few hundred content publishers are using RSS to deliver audio content, such as .mp3 interviews, “radio” shows and even audio messages to their customers.

•Textamerica.com allows people to post pictures, videos & text from their mobile phones and then make this content available via RSS feeds.

•Other companies are using RSS to deliver whitepapers and other educational content.

•One company uses RSS as a consulting billing awareness tool. The consultants create activity reports and the RSS feeds from the activity channels carry the billable information to the accounting staff for invoice preparation.

•Many internet publishers are using RSS to deliver their newsletters.

•Publish living digital catalogues of your products and provide your customers with your latest product releases, broken down by the categories they're interested in, and make it easy for them to order.

•Provide your affiliates and marketing partners with RSS feeds they can promote to their visitors to better promote your products and still make a commission. Amazon.com is already doing it. When are you starting?

•Create RSS autoresponders with scheduled messages, to keep in constant “marketing” contact with your prospects and slowly get them to the point of purchase.

•Provide limited-access content to your customers, employees, team members and even investors, without fearing other unwanted eyes.
Discover the Marketing Power of RSS Today
If this is enough to convince you that you need to implement RSS as part of your internet marketing strategy now, click here to order the "Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS" e-book, acclaimed as the best and most comprehensive guide on RSS for marketers by leading RSS developers, marketers, experts and thought leaders. This is the only report on RSS that is fully supported by the RSS industry.

Your order is completely risk-free, as the e-book comes with a 90-day unconditional money-back guarantee.

If not, keep reading to find out more in-depth how you can benefit from RSS ...

New -- Just added to this package: a bonus 1 hour and 15 minutes RSS video on RSS Marketing for Beginners

A new video covering the basics of RSS marketing has just been added to the Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS package.

Just over 1 hour and 15 minutes in length, the video covers everything from what RSS is, why it matters to marketers, what marketers can do with it to an in-depth explanation of the 7 key steps to RSS marketing success.

You will receive this video as a bonus gift with your order of Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS.RSS in Detail
How RSS Will Increase Your Business Success
Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

RSS will increase your rankings for the most important search engines and at the same time, through RSS specific search engines and directories, generate new traffic for your web site.

It will generate completely new traffic for you and help you increase the power of your existing traffic sources.

It will get you listed almost immediately, even at directories like Yahoo!, and will get you #1 positions for your most important keywords and phrases.

And the best part: it's free and quick; takes less than a day to do.

100% Content Delivery

Forget about spam filters that are keeping your content away from your subscribers. RSS gets 100% of your content delivered. This works for direct marketing messages, e-zine publishing, customer support and so on.

With RSS you can even easily deliver daily or hourly news to your subscribers, and everything else as well. RSS will help you expand your content delivery to daily content updates, content updates by interest, content updates for different target audiences and so on. Use one RSS feed to deliver your daily news and the other to deliver in-depth articles, and so on...

And don't forget about the power of RSS personalization and autoresponder messages, which are already possible.

Discover New Marketing Opportunities

New times bring new marketing opportunities, and RSS is the leader in this area as well.

•Use it to increase the sales of your affiliates by providing them with RSS feeds to better promote your products.

•Launch your own RSS product feeds and digital catalogues (Amazon started publishing those not long ago) that bring your products directly to your recipient's desktops. Amazon is doing, but not many other people yet. Be among the first and get a lion's share of your target market.

•Market through branded RSS aggregators and establish a constant connection with your subscribers. It's just like having a branded e-mail client that your customers and prospects are using every day ... but much cheaper.

•Find innovative ways of delivering your ads and direct marketing messages directly to your audiences, making sure they are actually read.

•Autoresponders are a great marketing tool, but are becoming ineffective because your prospects just don't want to give you their e-mail addresses. RSS gives you this very same power, but without the fear people have with e-mail.

•Use RSS to market to your existing customers, affiliates, business partners and employees/team members.

•Publish your own "podcast", a special RSS feed, which carries audio. Perfect for your own audio "radio station" or for getting your voice to your readers, without having to worry about too large e-mail attachments. Podcasting got so big that not only every respected internet marketers is using it, but also huge corporations like GM.

•Use RSS to deliver latest posts and topics from your forums directly to your readers, to increase forum popularity and the quantity & quality of conversations.

Get Your Content Published On Other Web Sites

Get your content easily published on other web sites to reach new audiences and use their traffic to increase your own sales, as well as achieve greater recognition as an expert in your field.

Again, it's free and easy, and has the potential of bringing your content to thousands and thousands of new prospects, who are ready to buy now.

Generate New Subscribers More Easily

Internet users are reluctant to subscribe to any more e-mail newsletters, but because RSS is so easy to control they don't have any problems with subscribing to new RSS feeds that match their interests.

That means that by having an RSS feed you can raise your visitor-to-subscriber conversion easily.

Just imagine how converting more visitors in to subscribers will improve your long-term sales ... every additional subscriber you get means a new potential sales and a long-term relationship that could lead to dozens of sales on the long-term, especially if you convert him in to an affiliate.

If however you're not using RSS, these sales could easily be lost.

Don't Worry About Messages From Your Customers Not Reaching You

E-mail messages, yes, even those from your customers and their business enquieries, are often lost due to spam filters.

With RSS, no messages from your customers or prospects will ever get lost again. That means that you'll now capture every business enquiery and respond accordingly, turning it in to a real sale.

(For the rest, please click on the link in the title)

Do XML Sitemaps Actually Help?

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:23:00 +0000

By Wesley LeFebvre
Posted on April 14, 2010
Site-Reference News

I don't know about you, but I stopped worrying about using XML sitemaps on most of the websites I manage a long time ago. Frankly, I felt It was a complete waste of my time trying to keep them updated regularly. There was no noticeably difference in the way Google crawled each website, or indexed the updated pages. So I DON'T agonize over them anymore.

I think site-maps are a great idea, and maybe they'll be better in the future, but I honestly feel like site-maps have been more of a nuisance than anything. They give a false sense of security that a page will be indexed or updated in a timely manor. And from my experience, an XML sitemap submission does not guarantee much of anything.

If you have a website or pages you want to get crawled frequently, here are a few things you might want to put your focus on before you worry too much about your XML sitemap.

Add a blog to your website! I can't emphasize this enough. If you have a website, you need a self-hosted blog. Twitter is great, and so is facebook, but a blog brings people and the search robots to your website. Update it weekly, and you'll establish yourself as an authority, attract readers and links, plus Google will crawl your website for updated content more frequently.

Link to your important pages! Do you have several "important" pages many clicks into your website? If so, you need to bring them closer to your home page. If you have several links on your home page to the less important pages, you may want to rethink your navigation structure.

Get more links! If your website isn't being crawled very frequently, maybe you need more links. Link-building is still as important as ever. Don't ever underestimate the power of link-building.

Create a static HTML sitemap. A static sitemap is great because it helps users find the most important content on your website. Obviously, it will do the same for the search engine robots too.

Even if an XML sitemap helps get your pages indexed, it's not going to help much with your rankings. An important page that wouldn't have been indexed otherwise, isn't going to show up in the top of the search results if it isn't getting any PageRank. Don't get too excited about getting your pages indexed. Indexation doesn't equal ranking.

If you use a content management system like wordpress, you can try a sitemap generator. I haven't used it myself, but this one has over a thousand reviews, most of which are very positive.

In conclusion: If rankings are important to you, then finish optimizing your website before you worry too much about your XML sitemap. What has your experience been like using an XML sitemap? Has your experience been different than mine, or about the same? Leave a comment and let us know.

Wesley LeFebvre is the owner of Seattle Web Services, a Seattle-based search engine marketing company. For more of his great SEO tips, follow him on his popular SEO Rankings Blog.

How to explain RSS the Oprah way

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:54:00 +0000

back in skinny jeans

Today, I’m going to explain how RSS can help you live your best life online.

We all have busy lives with very little time. Web surfing is fun but can take hours going to visit every single website and blog you enjoy.

Wouldn’t it be fabulous if you could just get all the headlines of the most current stories from all your favorite websites and blogs in one place?

Well now you can, and it is called RSS feed.

The Oprah definition

The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but to everyday folks like you and me, what comes to mind is, “Uh, I don’t get it?”

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

Suppose you have 50 sites and blogs that you like to visit regularly. Going to visit each website and blog everyday could take you hours. With RSS, you can “subscribe” to a website or blog, and get “fed” all the new headlines from all of these 50 sites and blogs in one list, and see what’s going on in minutes instead of hours. What a time saver!

That one place where your RSS list is created is called an RSS Reader, and it gathers all the headlines from all the websites and blogs you have subscribed to. In a moment, I will describe how to get an RSS Reader.

Subscribing to RSS feeds

But first, to “subscribe” to a website or blog’s RSS feed simply means that you are telling that website or blog, “Yes please. Send me your story headlines.” It’s like subscribing to a magazine or newsletter. Instead of getting a magazine or email, you will just get a list of headlines sent to your RSS reader. If the headline looks interesting to you, all you have to do is click on the headline and you’ll be sent to the whole story.

In order to subscribe to a website or blog’s RSS, all you have to do is click on an RSS symbol like one of those shown in the diagram above, or a text link of the words “Subscribe to our RSS feed” on the website or blog. Typically, you can find these RSS symbols or text links in your browser window, on the sides of the website page, or on the bottom of the page.

The publishers of the websites and blogs really want people to subscribe to their RSS, so they will make it very easy for you to find the subscription links.

RSS Readers

Now, because nothing is ever standard on the web like dealing with different operating systems, Mac vs. PC, and different flavored browsers like Internet Explorer, AOL, Safari, and Firefox, the way to get an RSS reader will be dependent on what browser you like to use, and how accessible you’d like your RSS list(s) to be.

Just like there are flavors of web browsers, you may see and hear of different flavors of RSS XML feeders like RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom. Again, the flavors are only important if you want to get techie. If you stick to looking for an RSS symbol like I have shown you in the diagram, you will be just fine.

If you’d like your RSS list to be accessible from any computer or mobile device you may have like a PDA, laptop, or cell phone, some popular RSS readers include (and almost all are FREE):

MyYahoo
MyMSN
MyAOL
MyGoogle
Bloglines
FeedDemon (this one costs money)
NewsGator (there is a cost for mobile accessibility)
NetVibes
PageFlakes
Shrook (For Mac users. Free trial and then there's a cost.)
Lektora
Attensa (more for enterprise, and there's a cost)

Update: If there are any other good RSS readers I've missed, please let me know and I will add them.

As you can see, there are a plethora of choices for you. All are good RSS readers, so your choice will simply come down to the style that appeals most to you.

RSS as Live Bookmarks

Browsers like Safari and Firefox allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds through the browser, and it’s called “live bookmarking”. Currently, you can only do live bookmarking in Internet Explorer if you have IE7 which is still in Beta. Oprah translation: Non-geeks cannot do live bookmarking in Internet Explorer because it’s not done yet. The limitation with using RSS in live bookmark form is that you only have access to your RSS list from the computer you created the bookmarks on. If you want the flexibility of complete accessibility, then I recommend going the RSS Reader route.

So there you have it. Are you now Ready for Some Stories? Enjoy!

This post is part of the ProBlogger "How to" Group Writing Project. Please visit Problogger for other wonderful "How tos."

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Making An RSS Feed

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:29:00 +0000

Making An RSS Feed
By Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch, Apr 2, 2003

Share RSS is a method of distributing links to content in your web site that you'd like others to use. In other words, it's a mechanism to "syndicate" your content.

To understand syndication, consider the "real world" situation where artist Scott Adams draws a daily Dilbert cartoon. The cartoon is made available to any newspaper that cares to run it, in exchange for a fee -- and 2,000 papers in 65 countries do so.

Unlike Scott Adams, syndication of web content via RSS is unlikely to make you rich. However, it can be an easy way to draw attention to your material, bringing you some traffic and perhaps a little net fame, depending on how good your information is.

What Is RSS?
How does RSS syndication work? Say you publish a new web page about a particular topic. You want others interested in that topic to know about it. By listing the page as an "item" in your RSS file, you can have the page appear in front of those who read information using RSS readers or "news aggregators" (explained more in my sidebar article, RSS: Your Gateway To News & Blog Content). RSS also allows people to easily add links to your content within their own web pages. Bloggers are a huge core audience that especially does this.

What does RSS stand for? There's a can of worms. RSS as introduced by Netscape in 1999 then later abandoned in 2001 stood for "Rich Site Summary." Another version of RSS pioneered by UserLand Software stands for "Really Simple Syndication." In yet another version, RSS stands for "RDF Site Summary."

History buffs might be interested that there's been some rivalry over who invented RSS. This is why we have both different names and indeed different "flavors" or versions of RSS. Mark Pilgrim's written an excellent article, What Is RSS, that charts the different versions with recommendations on which to use. I'll also revisit the version choice you'll need to make. But first, let's look more closely at some basics of what goes into any RSS file.

How Easy Is RSS?
I've been exploring RSS because it was time that Search Engine Watch offered its own stories in this manner. I've read several tutorials about making a feed, and they generally suggest that it is easy. They often offer code that you can "cut-and-paste" and link over to specifications that I actually don't find that clear.

For example, the RSS 2.0 specification has an "cloud" element that's optional but which a lay person might still wonder if they should use it. Meanwhile, heaven help the person who stumbles into the RSS 1.0 specification and its complicated RDF syntax.

Sure, making an RSS file IS easy for many. If you understand HTML, you'll probably understand enough to do a cut-and-paste from someone else's RSS file to make your own file. Don't know HTML? Start a blog, because several blogging tools automatically generates RSS files.

As for those non-technical people using WYSIWYG page building tools or personal home page building systems, have faith. Even you can build an RSS file from scratch, as long as you dispense with some of the extra features you probably don't need. We'll go through how to do this below. Later, I'll also mention some tools that will even do some or all of the work for you.

The RSS File
At the heart of an RSS file are "items." No matter what version of RSS you settle on, your file will have to include at least one item. Items are generally web pages that you'd like others to link to. For example, let's say you just created a web page reviewing a new cell phone that's being released. Information about that page would form an item.

To enter your item into the RSS file, you'll need three bits of information:

•Title
•Description
•Link

The title and description of your item need not match exactly the HTML title tag of the web page that the item refers to, nor the meta description tag, assuming you use these (don't know what they are? See my How To Use HTML Tags article). You can write any title and description that you think will describe the page. However, using your page's title and meta description tag certainly makes it easy to copy and paste to build your RSS feed.

In the case of our example page, let's say this is the information we settle on to define it as an item:

Nokia 3650 Combines Phone And Photos
I've been playing with the new Nokia 3650. Finally, someone has got the combination of a cell phone with digital camera capabilities right!

http://allgadgetsreviewed.com/nokia3650.html
Now we have to surround that information with XML tags. These are similar to HTML tags, with the exception that unlike with HTML, there's no set definition of XML tags. Anyone can make up a particular XML tag. Whether it is useful depends on the program that reads the resulting XML file. In the case of RSS feeds, they have their own unique set of XML tags that are defined. Use these correctly, and then anything that reads RSS will understand your information.

Did that make your head spin? If so, don't reread -- just carry on to see how simple it is. First, open a text editor like Notepad. We're going to build our RSS file using it...

(For the rest of this highly useful but somewhat dated piece, please click on the link in the title above this article.)

FeedYes.com gives rss feeds to every page on the web

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:31:00 +0000

"The best and easiest way to get custom made feeds."

FeedYes.com gives rss feeds to every page on the web
Reviewed by Robert Scoble, Dion Hinchcliffe, and Matt Marshall
Click on this blog entry's title to go to the website!

Automatically generated feeds for any page on the web

Just type the url of any page, and FeedYes gives you the feed
» Start now and generate a feed
Or: create a feed for your website manually

You can also use FeedYes to manually create a feed for your website
» Give your website a feed now
Examples for automatically generated feeds MTV News MTV News did not have a feed. So we created one.
eBay search for Ferrari Handy feed when you want to buy a Ferrari... toy.
Palm Springs news We created a feed for MSNBC news from Palm Springs

In depth: what can you do with FeedYes.com?
» Generate feeds for any website or specific page
» Save those feeds: read them with your rss reader or mobile phone.
» Syndicate those feeds: put the headlines on your own website
» Monitor websites realtime: always know the latest news from any webpage

Beginning RSS and Atom Programming

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:57:00 +0000

Danny Ayers, Andrew Watt
ISBN: 978-0-7645-7916-5
Paperback
775 pages
May 2005
Other Available Formats: Adobe E-Book
If you are an instructor, you may request an evaluation copy for this title.

RSS and Atom are specifications that give users the power to subscribe to information they want to receive and give content developers tools to provide continuous subscriptions to willing recipients in a spam-free setting. RSS and Atom are the technical power behind the growing millions of blogs on the Web. Blogs change the Web from a set of static pages or sites requiring programming expertise to update to an ever changing, constantly updated landscape that anyone can contribute to.

RSS and Atom syndication provides users an easy way to track new information on as many Web sites as they want. This book offers you insight to understanding the issues facing the user community so you can meet users' needs by writing software and Web sites using RSS and Atom feeds.

Beginning with an introduction to all the current and coming versions of RSS and Atom, you'll go step by step through the process of producing, aggregating, and storing information feeds. When you're finished, you'll be able to produce client software and Web sites that create, manipulate, aggregate, and display information feeds effectively.

"This book is full of practical advice and tips for consuming, producing, and manipulating information feeds. I only wish I had a book like this when I started writing RSS Bandit." - Dare Obasanjo, RSS Bandit creator: http://www.rssbandit.org/

WebRef and the Future of RSS

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:08:00 +0000

Introduction to RSS:
WebRef and RSS

We've been preaching the gospel of RSS for some time now at Webref, but lately we've got religion. Our Perl expert, Jonathan Eisenzopf, has been active in promoting RSS, even writing a Perl module for easy manipulation of RSS files, XML::RSS. Doc JavaScript has gone daily with his popular JavaScript Tip of the Day channel, and our XML expert, as you can imagine, has his own channel, and has created a Java applet for displaying RSS feeds.

We've adapted News Harvester to accept and output RSS files, and now use a modified version of Jon's channel manager script to update our front page and RSS file simultaneously. Now updating our front page is just a Web form away, and you can do the same for your site. To encourage the spread of RSS we're providing our channel manager script as open source:

http://www.webreference.com/scripts/

The Future of RSS

Thanks to the efforts of the likes of Jonathan Eisenzopf, Dave Winer and Netscape, future versions of RSS will incorporate popular additional fields like news category, time stamps, and more. With thousands of sites now RSS-enabled and more on the way, RSS has become perhaps the most visible XML success story to date. RSS democratizes news distribution by making everyone a potential news provider. It leverages the Web's most valuable asset, content, and makes displaying high-quality relevant news on your site easy. Soon we'll see RSS portals with user-rated channels, cool RSS site of the day, build your own topic-specific portal, and highly relevant search engines. A collective weblog would be another intriguing possibility. May the best content win.

# # #

About the author: Andrew B. King is the founder and former managing editor of WebReference.com and JavaScript.com. He has a BSME and MSME from the University of Michigan, and has worked the Web full time since 1993. He can be reached at aking@internet.com.

Further Reading:

Doc JavaScript's JavaScript Tip of the Day Channel
Exploring XML - Syndication intro, RSS Viewer applet
Meerkat Open Wire Service - O'Reilly's tech-oriented RSS news portal
Mother of Perl - XML::RSS tutorial, RSS tools, and scripts
News Harvester - accepts and outputs RSS, provides news clients for news harvester feeds (see the news topics links for available feeds)
RSS Resources - includes RSS portal list
WebReference.com RSS Channels

5 Hot RSS Tips To Increase MLM Blog Traffic

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:04:00 +0000

By Jon Roussel

What is RSS and how can it help you increase MLM blog traffic?

RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication'. RSS lets you directly deliver your content to all interested parties so they do not have to surf to find your content.

It syndicates your content. It helps you send updated headlines and brief summaries to your subscribers. It is a more efficient way to get your content 'out there, so you can increase MLM blog traffic.

RSS feeds provide an effective means to advertise new content on other websites without the hassles and spamming issues of mass email newsletters.

You can create an RSS Feed without coding it yourself by using an easy to use software applications that can format your XML. You can find some excellent RSS feed plug ins at Feedburner, Feedblitz or FeedForAll.

Here are five tips to set up and maximize your own feeds.

1. Set up Your Own RSS Feed

First, set up an RSS Feed for your site.

A blog created with Blogger or Wordpress will provide you with an RSS Feed that you can place on your site. Get a XML or RSS orange button and place it on your site. Link it to your RSS Feed url - this is your atom.xml link if you're using Blogger. You can also get buttons for feeds in various readers by going to Feedburner, Feedblitz or FeedForAll.

2. Place Other RSS Feeds On Your Site

You can place headlines on your site www.feedburner.com and gives you a headline animator. This will display the RSS feed's headlines with links to the content.

You can also put other content from a feed on your site, you can use http://www.feeddigest.com/ for free to automatically update news and feed content on your blog.

3. Place MSN Search Results Directly on your blog.

MSN has a beta program using RSS in their search. You can put RSS search results directly onto your blog. It can enrich your site with daily updated content. Fresh updated content will draw more eyeballs and increase MLM blog traffic.

It is easy to do; just add "&format=rss" at the end of the URL in your MSN search engine query.

4. Put Yahoo Results on your blog

5. Place the correct tags on your blog and in your posts

Tags are essentially keywords for blogs and you should always use them to increase MLM blog traffic.

Tags have recently gained attention because Technorati, which indexes 4.5 million blogs, started sorting blog posts by using tags.

Using the correct tags, creating different feed options and placing other feeds on your site are some simple methods to increase MLM blog traffic.

Jon Roussel is a successful internet marketer in Beverly, MA He helps people succeed with a home based business that will generate a long term reliable leveraged residual income. Learn more at Jon Roussel's Website

Jon Roussel is a successful internet marketer in Beverly, MA He helps people succeed with a home based business that will generate a long term reliable leveraged residual income. Learn more at Jon Roussel's Website

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jon_Roussel

Do You RSS?

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:46:00 +0000

By Joshua Hays

I have recently become acquainted with RSS, or Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication (depending on who you hear it from) and am amazed at how it has been forced on internet users in the most recent years through browser updates and site adaptations. If you have a blog or any other source of information that you want people or customers to regularly be a part of, it's practically 'required' that you offer the RSS option.

So what the heck is RSS? Does anyone even really know? There isn't a clear explanation listed anywhere on the sites that want you to subscribe to so how are new or lite internet users supposed to know what it is?

WhatIsRSS.com says that "RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing web content." In short, if you want to know if a favorite site, news or blog has posted an update, the RSS indicator embedded into almost every browser will highlight. It is an easy way to subscribe to information without having to give away personal information. Make sense?

Probably not. RSS has never really be explained, is it even popular among the people we really want to use it? Marketers and business owners are getting a hang of it but the demographic we are attempting to force it upon doesn't yet have an understanding. It's such a useful tool and very easy to use and explain - it doesn't make sense not have a brief explanation somewhere near the RSS subscribe button on your blog or forum that would help to encourage users to make the 'easy' transition into RSS.

I guess this unnoticeable transition is much easier to stomach than something like what we are doing for the digital television transition, huh?

Joshua Hays is an aggressive marketing consultant with a strong background in design and nearly ten years of broad experience involving both B2B and B2C marketing techniques including print and online campaigns. He has advanced knowledge of both the Microsoft and Adobe software suites and is cross-platform, multi-operating system (MAC & PC) trained. Joshua specializes in product and campaign development. Joshua Hays can be reached at http://www.joshuahays.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Joshua_Hays

Tips to Boost RSS Subscribers

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:40:00 +0000

By Sean Quah

RSS feeds or Real Simple Syndication is a technology that allows users to subscribe to websites, blogs, video blogs and pod casts, basically helping users to keep track of all their favorite sites and blogs without having to go searching each and every site for new updates.

It is a way for publishers and advertisers to get content out and it also helps in running online businesses and people who work from home. It is gaining popularity in recent times but still there is a need to boost RSS subscribers otherwise the benefits of news syndication are lost. There are ways to increase the subscribers to your news feed.

Firstly using a RSS auto tag by which the readers will know that your web page has a provision of using RSS news feeds thus you do not have to push your RSS feed, the browser does it for you for example web browsers like Fire fox now detect RSS automatically and ask the visitor if he or she wants to subscribe your feed.

Secondly by submitting your feed to RSS directories so that when the users are looking for RSS news feeds and go to RSS directory, they find your feed and if interested can subscribe to it. That is why it is important to submit to as many directories as you can and if you are looking to save time with RSS directory submission then Global Syndication can help you to submit your feed to top 45 directories for under $10. You can do it from working from home or at work.

Thirdly by creating an RSS Landing page which will make things simple for the first time users to understand the concept of RSS and to start using your feed and the best way to do it is to create a separate page on the site describing the news feeds you are offering plus the information of RSS in general.

Finally, by creating a branded RSS News Reader which will save the beginners user time and prevent them from the hassle of figuring out how to get a feed reader and subscribe to it. After following the above mentioned tips you will have a boost in your RSS subscribers and in turn you will succeed in driving more traffic to your website and also you can take this work as a part time job and work from home.

Working from home special report is a valuable and informative report on how you can make use of 3 proven ways to start profit by working from home. http://www.WorkFromHomeSpecialReport.com/ Quickly download FREE "How to Make Your First $1000 in 30 Days" report that shows you how to generate $1000 using different business models at no cost!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_Quah

How to Submit an RSS Feed the Easy Way

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Tue, 05 May 2009 03:14:00 +0000

By Erik Heyl

If you've been online for any length of time, you've probably come across RSS feeds. If not, you might be wondering exactly what they are and why you should care. This is perfectly understandable as the technological world is growing at an immeasurable pace that leaves even so-called "hardcore" nerds panting. But how to define RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is in fact a method of disseminating information quickly without much fuss. Simply put it is not one specific web feed format but many different ones used to publish frequently updated information, be it blogs, video, text, audio, in a standardised method, such as XML. Also called a web feed, the information included can be either full or summarized text as well as miscellaneous information such as publication dates, and authorship.

But how does this benefit the average person? It is great for busy people as RSS feeds give them the option to subscribe to many frequently visited websites and have those updates and news available to them in one place through the use of an RSS reader. And it doesn't really matter what the person uses as it is generic and can be read from anywhere by any reader, from a web browser to an iPhone.

That being said, if you own a website, be it for a physical or digital product or service, you might be wondering how an RSS feed can help your business grow. An RSS feed along with other forms of traffic, from article marketing to pay per click, allows you get "get the word out" about your product or service in quick and efficient manner. This also aids in getting more traffic to your site as well.

Over time, if done correctly, this will also increase the perception that your site and your business are serious and will be there for your customers.

But how can you submit an RSS feed? After all, unless you are in a technology related business, your expertise is most likely not Internet programming, graphics or websites. Your expertise is your business. You may be put off by what you perceive as something requiring a lot of time or technical expertise. In the early days of content syndication, this was true. But, unless you want to learn the ins and outs, it does not have to take a lot of time, nor does it have to be technical.

One method would be to set up a WordPress web log or blog. Any time you post to the blog, it will automatically create and submit your rss feed. The main issue with this method is that it takes time to setup properly and can become quite technical, quite fast and there is not the best documentation available to help you.

Another option is to pay your webmaster to do this or hire a contractor. The downside with this method is that you need to double check the work and you are held hostage to their schedule. And what if they decide to raise their rates?

The final option is to learn to do it yourself. But you need to be able to do so without all the technical jargon that seems to pervade most courses on technical subjects. You need to be able to learn it quickly, and be able to apply what you've learned just as fast. The key here is to get past the fear of learning something new. This way, you have total control over your site and can create and submit an rss feed any time you wish.

To start increasing your exposure through RSS feeds, go to create rss feeds.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Erik_Heyl

What is an RSS Feed, and What Can it Do For You?

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:58:00 +0000

By Samo Yanezic

You might have seen this term bandied about: "RSS feed." What is it, though, and what can it do for you? That's something a lot of us wonder about, and especially if we are Web marketers, it's something we can use to our advantage.

In fact, by using an RSS feed, both you and your services can be a lot more accessible and visible to people who are looking for you. In many cases, creating an RSS feed is as simple as filling out an online form and then submitting it. Take some time to learn about what an RSS feed is and what it can do for you. In fact, it can be extremely valuable to you in making your business both more visible and more accessible.

What does it mean? "RSS" stands for "Really Simple Syndication," or less commonly, "Rich Site Summary." It's probably true that you've seen this before but didn't know it.

RSS is used for a lot of materials that are then syndicated, like blogs. Let's say, for example, that you read the blogs of your friends or of those you follow professionally. For those blogs you follow, take a look and see if you can find a small orange colored icon with two orange lines around it. That little symbol means that that blog or other content is available through an RSS feed.

When a blog or other material is available through an RSS feed, you can have it "delivered" to you every time it updates with something new instead of having to go read it. And as a Web marketer, for you it can mean that you can get product updates, news about services, etc., out to subscribers in a way that's convenient to them so that they know what's going on without having to come and search you out.

With an RSS feed, all of the content you subscribe to can be delivered to you so that you don't have to go to continually check for updates. Therefore, if you offer an RSS feed for your own information, you're also recognizing the fact that your subscribers are busy and are making it that much easier for them to follow you.

It's a simple process to create your own RSS feed so that you can provide this service to your customers, potential customers and subscribers, too. How do you go about that?

One of the best ways to do it is to create your own blog. With a blog, you generally have RSS capability built right in so that it's a simple matter to set up an RSS feed. This makes it much easier for people to follow updates, news, new product information, and any other information you might want to post to your blog and that you want people to know easily. This makes it much easier for the people who do want to know these things to keep abreast of them.

So figure out what information you want to get out there, and make sure you set up a way for people to easily pay attention to and follow you. This is something that some people have difficulty doing, but an RSS feed can solve this problem quite easily.

Samo Yanezic is the Webmaster of Financial Freedom Informant.com - The Net`s Growing Source for Online Home Business and Investments Education. You can visit the site for more free help and advice. See also the Define RSS page.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Samo_Yanezic

The Advantages of RSS (Real Simple Syndication)

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:36:00 +0000

By Clif Ray Posey

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication or can also be stated as the Rich Site RSS is an acronym for XML is utilized for distributing your news headlines through the Web that is known as Syndication. The real power of RSS is indicated in the term Syndication. You can get information or messages across the web instantly to your websites, your readers and/or subscribe

RSS is a simple technology that helps to distribute your information whether it is Product Reviews, Special Offers, Resource Announcements and Articles by syndicating across the net. The more the readers, subscribers and websites that opt to your RSS feeds the more targeted traffic will be received free from their websites.

Websites That Succeeds provided this article and we do offer a free website builder but in addition to that along with the website you get a free blog. You can get real technical and use XML but you do not have to. With RSS Blog It which is the set p u for the blog you can make it so everything you publish (build) a page you blog is automated with the pages you have built were you approved them to go on your blog as you build it.

If this article seem to complicated and you would rather spend time writing instead of tacking care of the technical aspect of this Site Build It is much easier and more automatic with shortcuts to using RSS. Find our more here.

In order to take advantage of this simple technology, you can start by setting up a blog, as Blog's are RSS ready. The users get all the needed information without having to search much around from one web site to the other for new content and the best advantage is that, the website that distribute content through this way gets easier and more exposure.

The RSS readers or aggregates can be defined in two categories such as the Web-based and the Client Software. The Web-based applications are distributed and it is used from the hosted website remotely and can also be used within a web browser and hence it does not need any other software. The Client Software are aggregates that needs to be downloaded in your computer and are either a stand alone piece of software or a part of large piece of software that can be used for reading the RSS feeds. At present, there are many down loadable software programs available in the market, which are large and very complex in function and design.

You need to use RSS, as it helps you keep yourself updated with the accurate and best information available on the web. Your favorite sites need not be checked manually. As you start subscribing to the RSS feeds that you prefer, it will inform you of the news that occurs and save you valuable time that can be utilized to monitor your important business activities.

The users can very conveniently deliver their Internet content to the publishers to deliver their information to the end-users. It is much better as compared to the alert services of the e-mail content that can send you e-mail messages each time the content that is of your interest is published on the specific web site. It lets you to know that a new article is posted on the Web of your interest. All you need to start with the RSS is a News Reader, software that verifies the feed and allows you to read new articles that are added.

In short, RSS connect people in the real time and you can publish the contents and increase website traffic and also rankings of Search Engines. It assists you to generate new subscribers, get valuable feedback and increase affiliate sales.

About the author: Cliff Posey, owner of CRP Marketing, owns and operates webbusinesstoolsonline.com Cliff has also operated several other successful web businesses including Love Song Cards and Radio Career Consultants. The content in this article was developed from his experience in these businesses and his continual research into further business improvements. This Blog is for discussion about web sites and web site traffic therefore your feedback is welcome.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Clif_Ray_Posey

What is the Best RSS Reader For Windows?

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:25:00 +0000

By Virginia Daley

A windows RSS Feed Reader will allow you to quickly and easily subscribe to your favourite blog feeds and constantly update you with the latest news and updates. Some applications are stand alone while others are web based and you can only access them through your web browser. You can view the content of blog feeds either on the net using a site like yahoo or by downloading a free RSS reader software.

News aggregators and RSS feed readers are primarily the same thing. News aggregators can read any feed but their primary use is to view the latest news. Many mobile devices also support feeds too so they are not only available at your PC.

Free RSS Readers

Google has a free news feed reader which is very easy to use, yet quite comprehensive.

Bloglines also has one that doesn't involve any software installation. However, it is not as comprehensive as Google's in my opinion.

SharpReader is a great organizer with virtual folders included.

Newzcrawler has been specifically designed to keep you up to date with the latest breaking news worldwide.

Pluck is quite a novel application which actually plucks the latest information from your favourite websites online and plucks it then straight to your web browser such as IE.

My personal free version is Awasu. What makes it my number one choice is the fact that it's very easy to enhance it with specific plugins. Its interface is also very user friendly and quite enjoyable to use.

There are so many high quality free versions out there that I don't believe you need to spend any money at all finding the right reader for you.

Go to http://bloginferno.com/freemoneyblog2.html and get instant access to your own FREE money making blog PLUS 30 days free training to make money as a niche blogger.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Virginia_Daley

RSS and Search Engine Optimization‏

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:26:00 +0000

After putting a lot of thought into how to best use RSS feeds on your website and then creating them on your website, the next step is to promote them. As with any kind of marketing, where and how you advertise your website can determine the amount of visitors. The same applies to RSS feeds.

As you create your RSS feeds, keep in mind that the title should contain optimal search keywords. The more keywords contained, the more likely you are to have your feed come up when a particular search string is entered. This is not to say you should cram every possible keyword into the title of the RSS feed. Instead, keep in mind that you can have up to 15 different titles listed for the same link, article, content, etc. when creating the original RSS file.

Use descriptors to attract visitors to your site by tempting them to click on your feed. Think of text that will enhance your content, but not make it appear irrelevant. People are less likely to click on a RSS feed if it doesn't fit their needs and wants. By keeping the descriptors concise, but also tempting, you will drive people to click on your link over someone else's.

In keeping with the keyword search, don't forget that you can now search by theme. Use this to your advantage and group your RSS feeds into themes. When submitting them to search engines, group the feeds into specific themes. This can help bring your feeds up more often when similar themes are searched.

When you add RSS feeds from other companies, you can tell your website how to react when the feed is clicked on. Rather than have visitors transported to the new site, have it come up as a new window. This will help lessen the chance your site visitors will leave your website completely.

People don't use the back button as often, so it increases your chances of the person to continue to peruse your site if the RSS feeds pop up as new browsers.

As you design your RSS feeds, include your company's contact information. This entails your website, any relevant contact information, and if possible, your logo. The more experience a person has with your website, the more frequently he or she will recall it when thinking of your products or services.

Consequently, it also goes to say you need to make sure the experience is a positive one because it goes the same way with a negative experience, except it deters visitors from returning.

Use your feed within your own site. By promoting it within your own website, you can improve its standing on external search engines. Search engines often return results by the most frequently clicked first. If you don't have enough faith in your own RSS feed to include it in your website, why would anyone else want to subscribe to it? At the same time, RSS feed search engines often return results alphabetically.

Typically an English teacher would not count the word 'A' in a title when cataloguing it, but in RSS search engines, it is viewed as the first word of a title. Try to word your titles to begin with 'A' to improve their standing. As they are clicked on more and more, it will increase the feeds' standings in other search engines.

In order to utilize your well written and constructed RSS feeds, remember to subscribe to them yourself. Nothing gives others' faith in their content like seeing it on the originators' website. Use keywords appropriately in titles because you can write multiple titles to fit the same content. You can also use themes to help capture the essence of your RSS feeds. Keep site visitors at your website by 'instructing' external RSS feeds to open in new browser windows.

Lastly, don't forget to include your company's contact information with the website in your feeds. The more often these are put out to the general population, the more exposure you will get.

About the Author: Tim Eisenhauer - RssFeedDirectory.org gives you the maximum exposure for your RSS Feed. We are the premeire RSS Feed Submission service on the internet, helping your website get the extra exposure and traffic you need. Submit your RSS feed to our RSS Feed Directory today.

You Need RSS, Atom and/or ROR Codes on Your Website!

noreply@blogger.com (Karen S. Cole - Ghost Writer, Inc.) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:34:00 +0000

You Need XML Codes to Promote Your Website

By Karen Cole
Word Count: 1,300

Do you have a website? If so, you need an ROR XMLNS code button which leads to a full ROR/RDF code page for your website. This code tells search engines all about the special details you input into the code about your website. For example, it tells them special details about each particular product (or certain special ones) that you sell on your site or sites, it tells the search engine bots your contact information such as your business address and phone number (without informing the entire universe, as the code is invisible to all but you and the search engine bots examining your website), it gives info on special other links you want the search engine bots to associate with your website, and it gives any other such major info that you want the big search engines to explore and know all about from your website.

That's why you need this latest and greatest in Internet code technology: the ROR/RDF XMLNS code. It's a form of XML that doesn't validate like an RSS or Atom feed does; it validates through the RDF Validation Service. You can look that up on the Net, and you'll see what I mean. Meanwhile, there's the matter of the Really Simple Syndication and the Atom XML codes. These codes DO validate through RSS Validation sites as regular feed codes. These codes, also known as feeds, can be taken by people visiting your website and input into their own RSS and Atom feed readers, such as RSS Reader (which you can download for free off of their website) and other news aggregators and feed readers.

These codes are great for spreading news on your website around. Basically, they each introduce important parts of your website -- or even your whole site in its entirety -- if you choose that you want to spread every page around to the general public through what's normally known as news and blog aggregation readers and services. You can find these services on websites all over the Web, and they're rapidly gaining in use and popularity. A good example of such a service is the NewsIsFree website, a news aggregator. These services usually take news feeds of all kinds and some blogs, plus they're starting to take advertisement feeds. This latter portion is a bit of a worry due to the fact that spyware and adware can thus be passed in a widespread manner all around the WWW.

This is being looked into very seriously by the experts. Most people are concerned that RSS will be used like a tool for this, so please be careful about copying RSS advertisement feeds into your news or blog feeds aggregator. The news and the normal daily or weekly expression blog feeds should be perfectly safe, for now. You should be able to scan RSS and Atom feeds for all types of malware someday in the not too distant future.

The RSS and Atom feeds are attached generally to little tiny orange buttons labeled "XML" and nothing more. Sometimes Atom feeds are attached to little blue buttons labeled "ATOM". The buttons are less than half an inch long and only a few centimeters wide, and would be very hard to see if it weren't for their bright coloration. The type they sport is a bright white, too. Some services are starting to use slightly larger and more visible but similar buttons for their particular XML-related services. The ROR/RDF XMLNS buttons are a little bigger, being an inch long, but are the same thickness as the RSS/Atom buttons and are half orange and half grey. They say "ROR" in the orange portion and "INFO" on the grey side, off-center. They also have a light yellow line around each portion and the margin of the button, plus the type is a light yellow, making them a bit easier to see without being so brightly colored. They're mostly placed visibly on your site in order to boast that you now sport ROR/RDF code on your website.

You can go ahead and even input the code directly into your site without ever bothering to use one of the colorful but dull ROR buttons. Just upload the code in an ror.xml text file into the root directory of the site. You will have to do this whether you show the button or not, anyway, and you also have to do this in the case of the RSS and Atom codes. They upload as feed.xml and atom.xml or something very similar to that in most cases. There is some leeway when assigning the filenames to these special XML codes, but they have to be uploaded as text files into your website's root directory. You might, however, want to display one or more of the ROR buttons on your website, preferably on your site map or home page, as this button is solely there so that search engines can pick up valuable information you want to share with them about your website.

The more such links you have, the more often major search engine bots will pick up on them, you see. So we advise you to proudly display that you have ROR/RDF code on your website. If you would like to know more about these fascinating codes, please contact Rainbow Writing, Inc. at karencole@rainbowriting.com for more information. Also, we can readily build you any or each of these codes for a small fee. We hereby suggest you definitely get at least an ROR code for your website to raise your rankings in the search engines, or to keep them high, and an RSS code for a website feed for your valuable website or websites. Remember that you can hook up more than one website in a single feed or one ROR/RDF file code. This is one thing that makes these special codes so popular and valuable to users.

Rainbow Writing, Inc. (RWI at http://www.rainbowriting.com/ ) charges $25 per hour per code, which usually translates to $25 per each code we generate for you. If you bought one of each code we mentioned from us, that would thus total only $75. If you bought only the two we suggested and left the Atom code alone (it will be awhile before it's widely popular, but it is rapidly gaining in usage lately) that would only cost you $50. For an extremely large website with a lot of information, such as the many hundreds of pages of the JC Penney catalogue website, we would charge you by the hour and it would be somewhat more. We think it's well worth the cost to promote your website in such a cutting-edge and innovative manner, especially as it becomes less so and more popular over time.

You will see these little buttons on several of the websites you are visiting nowadays, especially the major company ones. Probably, you've already seen them, and now you know what they are! Pretty soon nobody will be able to do without these little "pill" buttons to advertise all of the services they have to offer their commercial or even their personal public. Sound like a fair deal?

Write us ASAP at karencole@rainbowriting.com and we'll get cracking on generating perfect, simple, streamlined and fully validatable (that means it completely functions) code for you.

We believe we should do this for you, but if you have the time, there are website tutorials on the Net that show you how to slowly or swiftly learn, depending on your speed, how to write validatable XML code. This can be quite complicated, so we are highly recommending that you use our services. Please write to us today and see exactly what we can do for you in the realm of authoring these somewhat complicated yet streamlined and enormously useful XML codes.

THE END

Executive Director and President of Rainbow Writing, Inc., Karen Cole writes. RWI at http://www.rainbowriting.com is an affordable online professional freelance writing agency working for everyone from low end to celebrity clients, and specializing in the ghost writing, editing, promotions and marketing of books and screenplays.