Create RSS Feeds For Your Blog or Website

This article focus on RSS, the benefits of using RSS, and how you can add them in your website. Many call it a Feed (i.e., WordPress users). RSS is written in XML.

What is RSS?

RSS Feed

Here is the answer:

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.
It allows you to syndicate your site content.
It defines an easy way to share and view headlines and content.
RSS files can be automatically updated.
It allows personalized views for different sites.
It is written in XML.

In order to learn RSS, one should have knowledge of HTML, XHTML and XML.

RSS Example

RSS documents (also referred as “feed“, “web feed“, “channel“) uses a self-describing and simple syntax. Here is an example of how a RSS document looks:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″ ?>
<rss version=”2.0″>
<channel>
<title>Dipendra Shekhawat Home Page</title>
<link>http://dipendrashekhawat.com</link>;
<description>Web Designing and Software Development</description>
<item>
<title>RSS Part</title>
<link>http://dipendrashekhawat.com/rss</link>;
<description>New RSS tutorial on blog</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Whydo you need to create or have RSS feeds?

There are many reasons for having feeds for your blog or website. I found these two below as the main reason to create or have RSS feeds:

If you update your content frequently and promote the feed effectively, it can help drive more steady traffic to your website.
RSS feeds also benefit users who want to receive timely updates from favorite websites or to aggregate data from many sites.

How to create RSS feeds for your BLOG or WEBSITE?

Now, we almost have a fair bit idea on what is RSS or feed? We will be proceeding towards creating RSS feeds for your blog or website.

Most of the blogging platforms like Blogger or WordPress have an inbuilt mechanism for creating feeds automatically. So you don’t have to actually do anything. For viewing the RSS feed URL of your blog or website you can just type in the “yourdomain.com/feed” or “yourdomain.com/rss”.

Now the actual work of creating feeds comes into picture if you have a static website as you will need to create RSS feed manually.

I would suggest using some type of software as it is not that feasible to write all XML by hand. You can try using feedforall for your static websites. They have an easy-to-use feed builder that lets you create and manage all your feeds in one place. You can also try feedburner.

What do you think?

If you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to email us or put your thoughts as comments below. We would love to hear from you. If you found this post or article useful then please share along with your friends and help them to learn.