| Creating a Blog Feed |
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| Written by Blog Editor | |
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Blog feeds are RSS (Really Simple Syndication) links from your blog that others "feed reading" and feed aggregating services monitor for new content. RSS Feeds are very popular now for promotion and syndication of your blog content.
In the old days of the Internet, you would add a new web page and the main content notification tool utilized was an email to your readers or an email newsletter to your subscribers. Feeds became very popular with the growth of blogs and the blogging community. RSS feeds contain a portion of all of your article or blog post content organized in any way you'd like the list presented. You can easily find programs that allow you to monitor various feeds to stay on top of the most recent content from your favorite websites or blogs that offer rss feeds. The feed itself is a file generated on your service or from your blogging service that contains your post title and a consistent preview of your content. The feed file can be parsed and presented as story and content links from just about any location online in which a publisher or individual decides to display your feeds. The important element of the syndicated feed is that the rss feeds links back to your own site for the full blog entry. This makes the blog rss feed an important marketing and post notification tool. There are even services (such as Technorati) that continually monitor blog posts. Thousands of other services and feed aggregators can now accept the popular atom and rss 2.0 format feeds. All major search portals allow you to enter feeds once you've created your account. Google keeps things simple and calls their reader, "Reader." Whice is an available free tool for any user with a google account. An My Yahoo, allows you to capture any feed or even to "Roll your own" feed based on a news keyword search. You'll also notice an RSS or Atom feed in the left margin of any Google news keyword search. Here we have published a Google and Yahoo generated news rss feed: see example . We utilize Feedburner.com as this tools provides additional information about your feed subscribers and even offers methods to promote your feed. Marketing your feed is an important marketing and promotion element of building awareness about your new blog. Our website generated rss feeds: Our Latest Blog Posts Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/StartingABlog?format=xml Our New Articles Feed: http://www.startingablog.com/index.php?option=com_rd_rss&id=1 Our New Resources Directory Listings Feed: http://www.startingablog.com/directory/plugins/rss/feed.php?list=new Your blog software, blog host, or blog platform will have the necessary options for you to configure a feed for your blog. Feed generation is already setup and ready for you to configure how your want your feeds formatted. If you are using a proprietary blog solution, ask your developer about how to add this important feature to your website. You can also manually create an rss xml file, or use a service like netvibes.com that allows you to manually build feeds from a collection of posts or articles with a website url.  |
