Adding RSS Feeds to your Web Site

Posted on January 25, 2006
Filed Under Promotion |

If you’ve ever wondered how to put a live news feed in your web site, here is the simplest way.

Take a look at the Hunter and Associates web site, on the homepage we now have live feeds from two sources that matter to us in our business. You could do the same with news from your own industry.

How did we get these feeds in? These are the simple steps.

1. First we identified continuously updating sources of information that we follow. In our case the two most important were the compilations of marketing news and analysis that now appear at the ClickZ website, and also the user-contributed news items and discussions in the search engine and website-promotion world that are collected by Threadwatch.

2. Both sites produce RSS feeds. RSS is essentially the ticker-tape of the Internet. You don’t ever need to know how it works if you don’t want to, just how to get it, and how to use it.

3. First we needed the URL of the news feed. At Clickz, their list of feeds is found here:
http://www.clickz.com/rss.php
We wanted the News feed, the top one in the list, so we just right-clicked on the XML/RSS link button, and copied the link location, which turns out to be this:
http://feeds.clickz.com/clickz

4. Now we have the link for the RSS feed, we need to publish it to our web site. We opened a free account at FeedDigest:
http://www.feeddigest.com/

The FeedDigest homepage should explain everything to you that you’ll ever need to know to set up a feed yourself - have your webmaster go there. The 2-minute QuickTime movie you can download will show you how to do it.

5. When you have the account set up, and when you’ve started your first feed, using the link taken from your preferred source, then all you need to do is choose one of the templates for the way you’d like the finished output to appear.

6. Then you copy the code that FeedDigest produces for you, and go to your own web site page, and either paste in the Javascript where you want the feed to appear, or add the PHP include if this is an option for you.

You’re done. The results look just like ours.

Next issue we’ll tell you how to create your own RSS feed. Many people have News sections in their sites that they update manually by hand. You can turn this into an RSS feed and publish a scroll of it on your homepage, for example, and also give visitors to your site the means to subscribe to your RSS feed of your own news.

You have been reading the Hunter and Associates Newsletter ISSUE 23, January 2006. The next issue will appear mid-March 2006.

Comments

One Response to “Adding RSS Feeds to your Web Site”

  1. rebeccalieb on January 25th, 2006 1:59 pm

    We’re so flattered you used ClickZ as an example. Good luck with your feed!

    Rebecca Lieb
    Exeutive Editor
    The ClickZ Network

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