One fast way to add content to your website is to display RSS feeds. While most may know about this, there continues to be a lot of confusion and uncertainty about what the terms - feed RSS XML - actually mean and how this all works. Let's see if some of the mystery about RSS feed display can be dispelled.
Feed - this is just a name, like 'web page', to describe a specific form of information packaging. While you go to a URL in your browser to view the content packaged as a web page, the URL for a feed brings the packaged content to you and 'feeds' your RSS reader, aggregator or even a script to repackage the content and use it to add content to your website pages.
RSS - variously defined as 'Really Simple Syndication', 'Rich Site Summary', etc., RSS is a specifically defined format for content. Just as your web pages can be defined to meet different types of formats such as the various html, xhtml, etc. standards, RSS is a standard way to package information so applications such as readers or scripts can use it correctly.
XML - This stands for "eXtensible Markup Language", and it's one of the markup languages derived from SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is probably the best known and most widely used markup language.
To oversimplify a bit, markup languages may have both structural elements, which are tags indicate what a piece of content or data is or its purpose and presentational elements, which indicate how a piece of content or data should be displayed. XML is a structural language while html mixes both structural and presentational elements.
RSS is XML strutured content using specific defined structural tags depending on which version of RSS is being used (most commonly RSS 2.0 now). While RSS does not included presentation elements, html is often included in the content. However, RSS readers, aggregators and scripts are not uniform in how they deal with embedded html as it is not part of the RSS standard.
Now to the good part. An RSS feed is made up of a number of items. Each item usually has at least a title, a link to the full content source, a description which is normally a summary or short excerpt from the full content source, and a date. Since the idea behind RSS feeds is that new content is being added regularly, they become a source of automatically updating content. Many feeds are constructed from news stories and therefore update quite frequently with new items. Other feeds derive from blogs, forums, websites and similar sources of newly added content.
As a site builder you want to provide current information related to your site topic for your visitors. And you'd prefer it didn't get stale, so updating content is a really good idea. It also can help keep the search engine spiders coming back to your site when pages update regularly. To use an RSS feed - or a group of RSS feeds to add content to your site, you will need a script to extract the content from the RSS items and prepare it for displaying on a web page.
You can find both free and paid scripts to do this. Some things you may want to consider in looking for a script package are:
- ease of use and the quality of the instructions
- the flexibility and display options
- how much control do you have over the output being displayed
- will it handle multiple feeds and really mix the items;
- does it allow for a stabilized display (one that DOESN'T update on each page load)
- does it save (cache) the items on a per page or even per display basis
- does it allow you to use different keywords on different pages for each display (if you are using keyworded feeds)
- does it offer you some way to use your own content such as PLR, public domain, etc.
Some of these features may be more important to you than others but you will want to find a package that will suit you now and also give you the opportunity to do additional things later on.