Set Up Your Own Newsfeed

Today I discovered something really, really cool. There are thousands and thousands of sites which need content. They are desperate for new content, because that's by far the best way to keep people coming back. Give them something new, constantly and steadily.

One solution to the problem is to get that content from other sites and webmasters. However, manually updating pages is way too much work. We are using computers, after all, and computers are good at doing redundant tasks over and over again.

That's were the idea of newsfeeds comes into the picture. Way back in 1999 Netscape needed a way to maintain content on their directory, so they invented something called RSS. This allowed webmasters to inform Netscape's servers what new information (headlines) were available on their sites.

For whatever reason, Netscape lost interest in this functionality entirely and it more or less disappeared. However, RSS was around to stay, and it has evolved into a general purpose newsfeed tool used by tens of thouands of web sites all over the internet.

Everything Huge content machines such as Moreover.Com to thousands of blogs (web diaries or web logs) make use of RSS to power their news feeds.

The most common purpose for RSS is to describe "What's New" for a site. This information is then available for display on other web sites. It's a great way to get other people to view your articles and data.

RSS is very simple and straightforward. The file is in simple XML format. XML is a language designed to describe data, and an RSS file contains data about headlines for articles on a web site.

You don't have to know anything about RSS or XML to create one of these files, however. How can that be? Because a service exists which will scrape (a term meaning to modify into RSS format) a web page and give you the RSS page you need.

Just visit http://logicerror.com/blogifyYourPage and follow the instructions.

What you do is edit your document and insert some special HTML tags around the items you want to include in your newsfeed. An example of an edited line is shown below.

<li>
<span class="rss:item">
<a href="Security/virussetup.htm">
<font size="2">Setting Up Your AntiVirus Software</font>
</a><font size="2">
First, get some antivirus software. Next, make sure it is 
configured in the most paranoid way possible.</font></span>
</li>

Add the <span class="rss:item"> and </span> tags for every headline that you want to include in the newsfeed.

Once you are finished adding those tags, visit the Syndicate Your Page site, http://logicerror.com/blogifyYourPage, uncheck the box requesting it to be added to a list of newsfeeds (for now) and enter your URL in the form. This will create am RSS file for you automatically.

This will result in a web page which displays the RSS code. You can take the URL directly from the address bar of your web browser. Referencing this URL will result in a new RSS page being generated for you.

Now you simply find some RSS newsfeeds and give that URL to them. Some good sites to visit for these feeds are listed below.

http://www.syndic8.com Thousands of newsfeeds and a very nice interface.
http://aggregator.userland.com/ Another newsfeed service

You can also download one of several RSS readers to examine your newsfeed yourself.