Blogging

There is lively debate about the republishing of RSS feeds on other sites. The argument surrounds the use of RSS feeds from the feed publisher being used in an unfair manner. This includes republishing the entire articles and not displaying sufficient credit to the original source.

Before we go into the details you may want to brush up on your understanding of RSS. This will help you fully appreciate and fully understand the issues involved.

I am glad this conversation is happening now as it needs to be made clear what fair use of RSS feeds actually means. There may be webmasters who are republishing RSS feeds in all innocence at the moment not realising the furore that is going on around them with regards to their republishing activities. I would like to help clear up any misunderstandings that surround RSS republishing.

Being an RSS publisher myself who is considering republishing other authors RSS feeds I would like to make sure I am not treading on any toes. I am basing the following RSS republishing etiquette on the good practice that Rok Hrastnik has enthused.

If you wish to republish an RSS feed then you should first consult the publisher with your intentions. This would be an email to the author stating how you wish to reuse their feed and the page or pages the feed will be republished on and the attributions you will make. You will need to clarify some points. If the authors feed contains ads then will they be republished? Will you be monetizing the authors work by placing ads on your republished page? To avoid conflict these issues need to be sorted out.

The general guidelines Rok Hrastrnik has provided state that the article title must link back to the original article. If the RSS feeds contains a complete article only an excerpt, Rok suggests 100 to 200 words, can be republished. A link should be provided to the article source, the website of the original publisher.

Further to this it is suggested that no archives are kept on the republished site and no full articles are used. I would suggest permission is sought from the original author if you wish to keep an archive on your site.

You can follow this discussion further at PR meets the WWW and Micro persuasion.

Allan is the webmaster at NewsNiche an RSS resource for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.

Creating an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is really quite a simple process. RSS is a lightweight XML design that is really easy to setup and implement. It’s a great way to pass on important updates, send out your articles or news, or send out your favorite website links!

RSS feeds can be setup in a very short time, literally a few minutes! Simply put, an RSS feed is basically a text file with a couple HTML looking tags. There is an area with the information about the feed, then individual blocks of code for each article or piece of content being syndicated. It may sound bad now, but I assure you it’s very simple to setup and I’ll give you a full working example by the end of this article!

The first thing you need to do is to create a file that you want to call your RSS feed. It can be anything, the name isn’t important. For this article I will call it “cool_feed.xml”

All the following code will be placed inside the “cool_feed.xml” file. This file is the primary file you will use, in fact outside of one minor modification to other pages in your website you will use this file exclusively for sending out your feed updates.

The above block of code as you can see is very similar to HTML, all it is doing is telling people the version of XML you are using, and the version of RSS you are conforming to, as you can see this is XML v1.0 and RSS v0.91.

The next thing we need to do is setup your “channel” which is the name of your feed, and a description of it. In addition to the description it gives some contact information, the language and the website you run.

Your Website Title http://YourWebsite.com/ What is your RSS Feed about? en-us Your Copyright Line Your@email.com Your@email.com

As I’ve mentioned several times before, it’s similar to HTML in that it has an open and closing block after each parameter. But you also may have noticed there isn’t a closing block for CHANNEL. That is because it is sort of the equivalent of the “BODY” block in HTML, it will do it’s close near the very end. Actually, we opened the RSS block up in the first block of code I gave you also, where we set the version, that is the equivalent to the HTML block and will be the very last thing closed at the end of the XML file.

Article Number One http://YourWebsite.com/Article_Number_One.html 1-3 sentences about your article

This ITEM block is your first article, every time you want to add an update you just create another ITEM block similar to this one. It simply has an article title, link to where the article is on your website, and a description field, which is normally 1-3 sentences long.

These are the final closing blocks of code for the channel and RSS blocks that you setup in the top of the file. You must have these blocks of code at the very end, in this order. I will give a couple of links to websites that can check your code to make sure it works properly.

Once you have saved all that code in your file, the next thing we need to do is modify your website. This set is NOT required by any means, but it tells your users web browsers that you have an RSS feed, if their browser supports viewing them.

All you have to do is add the following line to the HEAD field of your website:

Congratulations, you are the proud owner of a brand new RSS feed!

Ken Dennis http://KenDennis-RSS.homeip.net/

Really Simple Syndication is exactly what it’s name states. A very simple way to syndicate your websites contents to other websites and news reading programs. This article describes the benefits of creating an RSS feed, and not how to produce one, or integrate other peoples RSS feeds in to your website.

RSS is a lightweight XML design with a very easy format, very similar to HTML tags. Simply put, an RSS feed is a file that has a title, description, and link to your content. Implementing an RSS feed on your website takes a very short time and is a great way to drive traffic to your website. But don’t think that article writers are the only ones who can benefit from this form of information dissemination, it has many great practical purposes.

RSS gives you the ability to have a list produced that can be integrated in part, or whole in to another website. RSS gives you the ability to have other websites have up to date, accurate information from you online in seconds. Headline news, technical articles, website updates, security alerts, or your favorite food recipes are just a few of the things that you can syndicate!

You would be surprised at how many websites have RSS feeds that you may not have noticed, generally you can identify a website that syndicates their content by a graphic (normally at the bottom) that says “RSS” or “XML” or identifies in other ways that their articles are syndicated.

In addition to people receiving your syndicated articles over websites, there are many websites who keep up to date databases of RSS feeds. You can search their websites for your favorite topics and see what feeds provide information you like, then have it mailed to you, or browse it online. In addition web browsers such as Mozilla FireFox have introduced the live bookmark concept, which allows you to add dynamic content such as RSS feeds to your favorites, this creates a folder in your favorites and that folder polls your favorite feeds from time to time to keep you up to date all the time!

Really Simple Syndication is a great way to get way for webmasters to provide a valuable service to their users, other websites that may rely on them, and increase your traffic and reputation.

Ken Dennis http://KenDennis-RSS.homeip.net/