RSS for Non-blogs

[judyofthewoods]

If you have a plain html website which is periodically updated, you can let your readers subscribe to an RSS feed or RSS email updates. This can easily be done with a small piece of free software called RSS Builder which creates an xml file to upload to your server. Xml is a strict type of html code which can be read by RSS feed readers. Once you have created our feed, you have to register a channel, i.e. create your feed online. You can do this by using this free service RSS Express, where you can also validate the feed to make sure it does not create an error report - xml is strict. Just enter the url of the xml file and click validate. RSS builder works very well, and validates nicely. If you don't want to download RSS software you can create the xml file at RSS Express on this page by filling in the form fields.

RSS Express is for UK channels only, but does give a link where you can register non-UK channels. The Site also has a lot of useful information. Stephen Downes has a great tutorial How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer which gives you some RSS basics, and shows you how to create your own xml. Even if you don't want to build the xml page yourself (you can use much of the tutorial for cut and paste, just fill in your details instead), I would still recommend this article to get a better understanding of how it works. I chose to use the robot, but if that service ever ceased, this tutorial could help you make your own. And finally, set up your feed with Feedburner (now a Google service) and 'ping' it there, i.e. you alert the feed burner that you have new content. I believe it does pick up the feed automatically, but pinging is quicker. You will find the link at Feedburner when you set up your feed. Whenever you have new content, you simply open the feed in the RSS Builder, edit and then ftp the file to your server (replacing the last feed file), ping and that's it.

But how do you get the RSS button onto your site? When you join Feedburner, you will be able to get a piece of code which you place on your website. You can have an RSS button which allows your visitors to grab the feed and then read your updates in their feed reader. You can also get code which allows visitors to sign up for email updates. It is still an RSS feed, but delivered by email. There are still a lot of people who don't use a feed reader, so it is best to provide both. That can confuse some people (choices!), so it is worth experimenting with dropping the RSS button and letting the web savvy collect the feed from the address bar. All you have to do to place the orange chicklet up there is paste this piece of code into the head section of your page, making sure the path is adjusted if needed:

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<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="THE NAME OF YOUR FEED" href="http://www.YOUR DOMAIN.com/YOUR XML FILE NAME.xml" />

For all my Luddite brothers and sisters, who want to add a little pizazz to their hand-crafted website, but think life is too short to learn php and other complicated scripts to build or maintain a proper blog, this is the way to go.