Copyright 2006 Richard Keir
The ongoing buzz about RSS feeds seems to still be almost matched by ongoing
confusion. After a couple years of working with both sides of the RSS
equation, site feeds and RSS feed display, I've come to think of the
differences in a fairly simple way that may get rid of some of the
confusion.
Try thinking about RSS in terms of Input and Output. Visualize your site as
the center point. On the one hand you have what comes to your site and does
something there. This is the Input to your site. On the other hand, you have
what leaves your site, and that's your site Output.
Here's two quick examples. Your incoming links from other sites are Input
for your site. The links you have on your site that go to other sites are
Output. Your visitors are Input. Hopefully the visitor Output involves
something good for you like going to an order processor.
RSS Feeds Display is the input side of RSS from the point of view of your
site. Essentially you are bringing in RSS feeds and displaying items from
those as content on your site. That's the RSS feed as content Input.
An on-site RSS feed, containing items from your site intended to be used
off-site would be the RSS Output side. That, however, will have to wait for
a later article.
Since everybody has their pet interpretation of what RSS means, I'm going to
ignore that. But to see more clearly what a feed is and how it works, let's
take a brief look at just what's in one.
Just so you know, a variety of feed formats and coding structures exist, but
let's skip that too. Just like a web page has the underlying html (or an
equivalent code type) that tells the browser what to do and how to display
the page, the code used in RSS feeds defines the different pieces of content
and tells a feed reader or another program what each thing is and therefore
how or where it can be used in an output display (or ignored).
Every RSS feed has a header section that provides information about the
feed. Some have a lot, others fairly little, but normally at least the name
of the feed (the feed title), a link to the site providing the feed, a
description of the overall feed content, the language used, a copyright
statement, and a date time stamp of the last time the feed was built are
included.
Then the individual feed items begin. The minimal content is the item title,
the link to the item, a description and the date published. Other items such
as a guid (an identifier which can allow feed readers to ignore previously
read items), category entries (which are similar to and used like technorati
tags to categorize the feed item) and a variety of other elements depending
on the feed source and purpose can be included. In almost all cases, for
display, all we'd be interested in are the title, link and description.
The descriptions in the items can be short segments of text or the full
content of a page, article, news item, blog entry, etc. Pictures can be
included and some descriptions are even loaded with html code to control how
the item is displayed (this seems to be more common with descriptions
containing images). And, of course, some feeds contain ads of various kinds.
However, ads are not usually embedded in the item description so this is not
normally a concern for displaying on your site (but, remember to always
check the items displaying on your page to make sure you want to keep
displaying items from any particular feed).
Each item in the feed has the same structure. The uniformity is what allows
feed readers and scripts to consistently handle RSS feed displays.
There are several ways to display feeds, usually php or other server side
scripts or javascripts. RSS feed items displayed via javascript are
generally not a good choice if you want the search engine bots to be able to
read the content. Other scripts will output the content as part of the page
(usually updating each time the page is reloaded) or create static html
pages. These latter kinds of feed item displays can be as easily read by
bots as any html content.
You can find a variety of free and paid options for displaying RSS feeds. If
you are a tech type and enjoy working with scripts some of the free options
may be a great choice. While they can do an excellent job, they tend to be
slightly to seriously complex and, in my view, somewhat feature deficient.
Of course, the more complex they are, the more features they tend to have.
Paid options also vary significantly and I'd encourage you to check out them
thoroughly. Be clear about what you want to do and make sure any paid script
solution will do what you want in a way that works for you.
Using RSS for content (the Input side of RSS feeds) can be a valuable
addition to your site from an SEO perspective and provide your visitors with
useful information - particularly if you choose feeds tightly related to
your site theme and mix the feed content to provide your own unique
combination of related news. However, note that word "addition". These days
using a feed or feeds for a significant part (or all) of your site content
is unlikely to gain you much favor with the search engines and may get you
dropped from the index faster than you got added.
The point is that smart, moderate use of feeds still gives you the twin
advantages of regularly updating content for bots on otherwise static pages
and more themed information for your visitors. And that's what the RSS Feeds
display deal is all about.
About the Author
Richard is a writer and a programmer/developer with several products in the
field of RSS feeds. On the input side for displaying RSS Feeds on your site
see http://RSS-Wrapper.com and for additional articles and content on RSS
feeds visit http://GeekWerkz.org