Matia Bryson

How To Create a RSS Feed for Your Website

Lesson Two — Creating RSS Feeds

One of the reasons for having RSS on your site is so that you can submit the feed to RSS directories to get extra backlinks. I also use my RSS feed for my “sitemap” in Google Webmaster Tools. This helps to get all my content pages indexed by Google quicker.

I am trying to skip all the really technical stuff that I only have a glimmer of understanding about, but let me say that to create an RSS feed for your website you need to create an XML file.

If you use Wordpress to create your sites, you may already have a site RSS feed depending on your template. Look everywhere on your site for the term “Entries RSS” or the orange RSS icon. That link will take you to your XML page that is your RSS feed.

Now I know of about 4 ways to create your own RSS feed:

1. Build a blog using Wordpress (and there are other blogging platforms), and let it do it for you automatically as you create posts.

2. Build it from scratch yourself. Use a template. Be sure to validate the feed if you go this route at http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi.

3. Go to Hostmyrss.com, get a free account and create your feed from there. All you need are the URLs of the webpages you want in the feed. You should already have content on those pages because it will take about the first 250 characters of your article to be the description for each item of your feed. This is a new service by Jonathan Leger. I don’t know if it will always be free, or if it will always be available.

4. Go to Feedyes.com and get a free trial account. Create a “manual feed.” Then be sure to add your items (each content page of your site should be an RSS feed “item”). With this format you can choose what the item title and description will be.

For 3 and 4 you will need to copy the feed created by Hostmyrss or Feedyes and create your own XML file to upload to your website. Click on the feed url. In Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, press ctrl+U. (In Internet Explorer, use Page > Edit with Notepad.) What you see will look kind of like HTML gobbledeguk, but not exactly. It’s XML not HTML. (How do you like that for technical explanations? :p) Select all (ctrl+a) and copy (ctrl+c), then paste (ctrl+v) into a Notepad file. Save the file with an .xml extension such as “bluewidgets.xml” or simply “rss.xml.” Be sure to select “Save as type: all files” so it does not save it as a .txt file. (Also with options 3 and 4, you can change any links to Hostmyrss or Feedyes within the feed to your own URLs if you want to, but you could leave them a link to show your appreciation for a free tool.)

Upload your XML file to your webhost and create a hyperlink to your feed in your site navigation or at least on the home page. It is not necessary to use the orange icon. I usually use “RSS” for my anchor text. The orange icon is pretty and does show up nicely if you want to use it.

Well, that’s enough for today. Maybe someone else knows of any other ways to create feeds, and they will pipe up. Next time I think I will cover where to submit your feeds.