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Newsfeeds

You may have noticed small orangle 'rss' or 'xml' newsfeed icons on some websites you visit. If you click on these you get some article abstracts in XML format (eXtensible Markup Language). Websites can syndicate part of their content via a newsfeed. There are currently two main standards: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom. Other websites can integrate your headlines into their content and software news aggregators enable end users to scan headlines and article summaries and then click on a link to read the full text from your site. The Mozilla Thunderbird email client recently added newsfeed aggregator features and Yahoo! allows its users to build custom news pages.

News syndication is a great way to build awareness of your content and website and drive click-through traffic to your site. This can be done with relative ease and without major expense or ongoing work. Websites that integrate your feed also provide valuable inbound-links with relevant anchor text. Your syndicated content can help build relationships with users who will frequently look at other content on your website. There are a number of newsfeed directories, including MyYahoo! that can help publicize your syndicated content and also provide inbound-links.

Many content management systems, especially Blogging software, provide newsfeeds as part of the package so beyond publicizing your content there may be no further work to do. You may also start a Weblog, for example with Google's popular blogger.com site, as an adjunct to your main site. Blogger integrates Atom format newsfeeds as standard, the feed must be enabled under the site preferences and can be found in the file atom.xml under your home directory.

Software tools such as Tristana Writer <http://www.charlwood.com/tristana/writer/> can automatically scan an existing webpage, for example a static 'what's new' page and then build RSS and Atom syndication files. These can be published using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to your website.

Once the feed, effectively a URL pointing to a resource on your webserver, is running it should be checked with a validator to make sure there are no errors. The Feed Validator website: <http://feedvalidator.org/>, can verify both Atom and RSS feeds. The feed can then be submitted to feed directories, here is a short list:

2rss <http://www.2rss.com/> has tools for converting Atom feeds to RSS format and for generating WAP content suitable for cell phones. The above sites help end users and site builders find relevant feeds and are also indexed by search engines so providing additional inbound-links to your website.

Newsfeeds

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