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Blogs and RSS Feeds

Based on research, and experience setting up
Barrie's Angel Journal

 

 


Are you looking for fresh information and entertainment, or considering becoming a blog publisher? Each of these is catered for on this site, but you may not need to peruse all the sections.

For how to add fresh relevant content to your web site please see the related page on RSS Website Content.

Introduction

Weblogs and RSS Feeds have been around for a few years and have now made their way into the mainstream business & marketing worlds.

Blogs are a way for people to write a message and instantly have that message appear on a website, without having to learn to use an HTML editor. Anyone can create a blog within an hour or so, on any topic, even pictures, audio, and video.

Readers are in complete control of what they subscribe to, in contrast to email which is becoming unusable for many.

RSS feeds are generated by blogging or other software, and provide a means for others to import the contents of a site or just selected blog messages. Thus RSS is a way to "syndicate" your message to targeted and interested readers, via news readers or by being displayed on other web sites. See:


Page Contents

Related Pages

  1. RSS Website Content
  2. Design Resources
  3. Development Tools
  4. Email Forms Gallery
  5. Mailto: Encoders
  6. Content Management
  7. Website Portfolio

 

Zero Spam

How to Subscribe to News without being spammed, using RSS Feeds.
Get Your F'ree Report (pdf, 331 KB)

 
 

Viewing Blogs via RSS

You need an RSS News Reader or Aggregator. These typically run on your PC, although there are server or service based News Aggregators, see below.  

  • PLuck is a well regarded plug-in for the IE browser.
  • NewsGator is integrated with Microsoft Outlook.
  • Feedreader is stand alone.
  • Wizz RSS News Reader is integrated with Firefox, and has lots of features, mixed reviews and takes some getting used to.
  • The Habari Xenu extension for Mozilla Firefox does not seem to have been updated for the latest version of Firefox.
  • See the list of RSS readers on blogspace.com.

Note: blogs are not just for reading, but increasingly carry photos and multimedia.

Setting Up Your Own Blog

You don't have to have blog software to publish frequently changing information, but it helps by providing most of what you need in an accessible package, without having to learn to use an html editor or to program.

There are two basis approaches:

Subscribe to a free or commercial Service

  • Www.blogger.Com - one of the original popularisers that enable anyone non-technical to set up a blog, though it now seems to be disparaged by many (because of perceived bad service) in favour of :
  • TypePadis an application service based on Movable Type, and by the same people. Tailoring is limited, unless you get the premium service, but set up and maintenance is much simplified. Recommended: I went for the mid-level package for Barrie's Angel Journal @ $8.95 per month less various discounts.

Get the software

And get it running on your own server (or yor ISP's). This gives more flexibility and tailorability, but you typically have to be comfortable installing a php application. Unless you wish to pay more for a packaged solution or pay somebody else to set it up for you.

  • Movable Type seems to be the favourite, and costs from $69.95 pa.  Typically it runs on Perl and MySQL, on a Linux server.
  • PHP Nuke and derivatives - see Content Management Systems Review provide much of the functionality of blogs, but also a wider range of content management functions. They do need some technical competency to set up.

See also: RWN's Short & Sweet Guide To Creating Your Own Blog

Publish Your Own RSS Feed

(for Syndication)

You should consider publishing your own RSS feed, to make available to others your regular new content because:

  • It costs nothing- and delivers great results
  • A Blog makes you an authority in your niche
  • It generates extra traffic to your site
  • Blog pages get ranked higher by the search engines
  • RSS directories get you listed & deliver traffic at no cost.
  • Your blog and feed make it easy for other websites to link to you
  • You can get your message in front of potentially millions of targetted readers, some of whom will follow links back to your main site
  • You can contribute as part of a community.

Publishing your own feed involves several steps:

  • Generate and validate your own RSS file
  • Put a link to the RSS file on your blog or web site
  • Submit it for listing on the directories
  • Update content regularly
  • Link to and from compatible blogs.

For a guide to how to do this, see the Headline Syndication Overview. Software tools available include:

For technical background, you could start with webreference.com - RSS Syndication and Aggregation, but there is really no need to bother, with all the software out there that does it for you.

Syndication Services

Blog Search Engines

The categories overlap, but some are search engines with plain interfaces, seeking to rival Google but blog based.

Some of these scans weblog daily and generate a list of weblogs ranked by the number of incoming links they receive from other weblogs on the list. THis is much more powerful than it appears at first.

News Aggregator Services

These aim to do some of the work for you, collecting RSS files from content providers and presenting it in various ways, sometimes as a personalised portal:

News Aggregator Software

More corporate portal tools?

Simpler Directories

The following are simpler or more personal directories:

and thousands of others!

Getting Traffic

See:

Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day from BrainyQuote.com

Luc de Clapier
"The maxims of men reveal their characters."
Marie Curie
"Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas."
Stewart Udall
"We have, I fear, confused power with greatness."
William Christopher Handy
"Life is like a trumpet - if you don't put anything into it, you don't get anything out of it."

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