Academia has embraced RSS as a means to educate, but scrutinizing how educational institutions are using RSS feeds in their daily routines show RSS is utilized can vary across different industries.

1. Share Resources
Academics are using social bookmarking websites to share quality websites that relate to their area of expertise with colleagues and students.

Academia Adds RSS Feeds to Their Teaching Tool Kit

Lawyers have never been known as a technical bunch, but more and more often you see a lawyer with a palm pilot making appointments and a blackberry for those urgent messages. Electronic gadgets are now common in the courthouses across the US. Lawyers have increased productivity by utilizing technology so it should come as no surprise that lawyers are using RSS feeds as a means to grow and manage their practices.

Lawyers are using RSS feeds a number of different ways to increase efficiency and productivity. Common RSS feed usage in the legal field include:

Lawyers Use RSS Feeds

Daily more and more realtors are turning to RSS as a tool to market homes for sale. The growing RSS phenomenon in the realty market makes perfect sense. Unlike email RSS feeds have a 100% delivery rate. In addition the costs involved in creating and managing an RSS feed are insignificant when compared to the print advertising Realtors spend on each week. Imagine the amount spent each week to promote various properties in circulars and weekly newspapers, compared to the costs associated with updating and managing an RSS feed.

Realtors Employ RSS Feeds to Sell Homes

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication as it is commonly known, is a technology that gives webmasters the ability to easily distribute and publish syndicated content on the Internet. It seems like all Internet businesses now have RSS feeds available; at least your competitors do. You have finally made the decision that you have to have one. Where do you start?

Steps to Creating & Promoting an RSS Feed

RSS feeds are a great communication medium, and when properly managed, web feeds can bring in significant Internet traffic. RSS feeds should contain compelling themed content with episodic titles that are united in common broad theme. Use RSS feeds as an online marketing and search engine optimization tool. Just as optimizing an HTML web page will increase exposure, so too will an RSS feed that is properly optimized and promoted. Use these simple tips to improve your web feed exposure.

RSS Feed Tips to Help Search Engine Optimization

There is little argument from webmasters and publishers that RSS brings in traffic. So once you've made the leap and created a feed, how do you tell your visitors about the feed?

1. Submit Your RSS Feed to RSS Directories.
This will not only increase the number of sites linking to your website and increasing your link popularity, it will also increase the RSS feeds profile. A number of RSS search engines and RSS directories exist that allow you to freely submit RSS feeds. Feeds are generally categorized and grouped together by subject. Web surfers looking for RSS feeds about a specific subject will often search the RSS directories, to locate a feed that matches their specific criteria. Topic specific RSS feed and podcasting directories are also emerging. Choose a web feed's category carefully and only submit relevant feeds to topic specific directories.

Publicize Your RSS Feed

Just as the second generation of search engines and directories evolved into niche topic specific portals we are seeing the same occur in the area of RSS feed directories and search engines. While some directories are admittedly more niche than others the trend is obvious.

Why Niche RSS Feeds Matter

You have an RSS feed and you have worked hard to get the word out. According to your logs you have subscribers! Now the hard part: how to retain the subscribers to your RSS feed. Follow these simple steps to insure that your subscriber base will grow.

13 Tips to Maintaining an RSS Feed Subscriber Base

Growing subscribers of your RSS feed will expand your reach. Put the appropriate effort into marketing your RSS feed, so you can increase adoption and spread the message contained in the RSS feed.

Increase Your RSS Feed Subscribers

Citizen journalists and writers have become common place on the web. Perhaps you are considering blogging, but are unsure of how to enter the world of online journaling. As the medium has grown, I thought it might be a good idea to put together some general guidelines for new bloggers and reminders to veteran bloggers about blogging practices.

There is no Emily Post in blogging that offers etiquette advice, or a Miss Manners that details appropriate behavior. That does not mean there are not acceptable and unacceptable actions that bloggers should take. In order to efficiently communicate as a blogger on the Internet, it is critical to understand the unwritten rules of blogging etiquette.

RSS Feed Etiquette

The best blogs and feeds are those that contain unique, fresh, compelling, content. So where do these prolific posters get their ideas? I talked to a handful of bloggers to determine where their inspiration originated for their content.

How do you get ideas for blog posts and RSS feed posts?

Here are some general guidelines for creating RSS Feeds:

1. Enclosures

Include only one enclosure per item for maximum compatibility. The RSS 2.0 specification does not clearly state whether multiple enclosures are allowed or not, but most RSS readers will only support a single enclosure. Therefore, it is best to conform to the readers, and only include a single enclosure in each RSS feed item.

Etiquette for RSS Feeds

More and more companies are using RSS as a means to communicate, so having an RSS feed that is professional and well polished will help differentiate your company from your competition. What makes an RSS feed professional? Follow these simple steps to polish your RSS feed and take it to the next level...

Create Professional RSS Feeds

As publishers have moved towards monetizing RSS feeds, their have been vibrant discussions as to whether advertisements in feeds are viable or whether they will drive subscribers away. At the end of the day while it appears that many are discussing the philosophical approaches to ads in RSS feeds few are taking the time to examine the options available for inserting advertisements in feeds. Ultimately the advertisements served are going to determine the success of RSS as an advertising medium. The ads served must be related to the content contained in the feed. If the RSS feed contains quality content, the ads are relevant, and the volume of ads is in balance with the volume of content served, advertising in RSS feeds will succeed. Take a closer look at some of the ad serving options currently available for RSS feeds.

Advertising in RSS Feeds

Measuring and tracking RSS while a fairly simple concept, is really anything but. Unlike websites, RSS have the added caveat of potential syndication, making accurate tracking a challenge to anyone but the extremely tech savvy. It is not unrealistic for marketers to want to know how many subscribers they have, which items in their feeds attract the most interest, or how many click-throughs are generated as a result of an RSS feed.There are a number of 3rd party providers who focus on tracking the consumption of RSS feeds. Some solutions are rudimentary but likely sufficient for a small business testing the waters with RSS. Other RSS tracking solutions are more complex and while they can come close to being accurate, with syndication there is no solution that tracks with 100% accuracy.

Measuring RSS Feeds

You have an RSS feed and you have worked hard to get the word out. According to your logs you have subscribers! Now the hard part: how to retain the subscribers to your RSS feed. Follow these simple steps to insure that your subscriber base will grow.

13 Tips to Maintaining an RSS Feed Subscriber Base

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication as it is commonly known, is a technology that gives webmasters the ability to easily distribute and publish syndicated content on the Internet. It seems like all Internet businesses now have RSS feeds available; at least your competitors do. You have finally made the decision that you have to have one. Where do you start?

Steps to Creating & Promoting an RSS Feed

More and more companies are using RSS as a means to communicate, so having an RSS feed that is professional and well polished will help differentiate your company from your competition. What makes an RSS feed professional? Follow these simple steps to polish your RSS feed and take it to the next level...

Create Professional RSS Feeds

If you are struggling with the decision of whether to implement RSS feeds or not, consider the following pros and cons for webmasters who use RSS feeds as part of their content and communication plan...

Pros and Cons of RSS Feeds

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication as it is commonly known, is a technology that gives webmasters the ability to easily distribute and publish syndicated content on the Internet. It seems like all Internet businesses now have RSS feeds available; at least your competitors do. You have finally made the decision that you have to have one. Where do you start?

Steps to Creating & Promoting an RSS Feed

There is little argument from webmasters and publishers that RSS brings in traffic. So once you've made the leap and created a feed, how do you tell your visitors about the feed?

Publicize your RSS feed

Growing subscribers of your RSS feed will expand your reach. Put the appropriate effort into marketing your RSS feed, so you can increase adoption and spread the message contained in the RSS feed.
Feed Validation

Make sure that the feed is properly formed. Some RSS readers and aggregators will be unable to compensate or read an RSS feed that is not correctly formed. There are both web-based and desktop feed validation tools available that can help determine whether an RSS feed is properly formatted or not. After you edit the feed, be sure to spend a few minutes validating the feed.

Increase Your RSS Feed Subscribers

The best blogs and feeds are those that contain unique, fresh, compelling, content. So where do these prolific posters get their ideas? I talked to a handful of bloggers to determine where their inspiration originated for their content.

Not surprisingly, ideas for blog posts or RSS feed items originate or are influenced by other web content. The following are venues for finding your online muse:

1.Google News
Monitor Google News for keywords related to your industry. If you find a story you disagree with or wholeheartedly agree with write about it. Add your thoughts, and editorialize the content. This does not mean you should just repost Google news summaries. The value is not only in the news aggregation, but in the commentary that you provide. Tie news items to specific events, conditions, or the impact of specific news on the industry. Adding a view point or reference to a news article adds genuine value.

How do you get ideas for blog posts and RSS feed posts?

RSS is a standard for syndicating content on the Internet. RSS feeds are used in a variety of ways to distribute all types of content via the Internet. The benefits for individuals subscribing to RSS feeds have resulted in a rapid growth and adoption rate. Software and tools have made RSS feed creation and management easy, even for non-technical individuals, which has also fueled the growth of RSS feeds.

Create RSS | Make RSS Feeds

RSS offers webmasters a unique opportunity to display fresh content on websites. While publishing an RSS feed is a great way to generate site interest and increase communication, syndicating and displaying feeds from related relevant sources can also generate interest, increase traffic and improve search engine ranking.

Displaying RSS Feeds

In general, the following are guidelines for constructing an RSS feed. It is good to get into the habit of validating the RSS feed, either with software, or with an online validator.

Here are some general guidelines for creating RSS Feeds:

1. Enclosures

Include only one enclosure per item for maximum compatibility. The RSS 2.0 specification does not clearly state whether multiple enclosures are allowed or not, but most RSS readers will only support a single enclosure. Therefore, it is best to conform to the readers, and only include a single enclosure in each RSS feed item.
2. Date Formats

Date formats can be very tricky; be sure that all dates are properly formatted.

Etiquette for RSS Feeds

With all the vast amounts of information available on the web, it is becoming more and more difficult to sort through and find what you are looking for. RSS significantly lowers the signal-to-noise ratio. RSS has the unique ability to compile information and filter it, so you only see unique and relevant content. The information superhighway has become packed with content, and those familiar with technology are using RSS to filter the content, allowing them to drill down and access only the content they want, without having to wade through all the noise.

There are very few subjects or topics that do not currently have an RSS feed available. Perhaps it might be easier to ask what can not be published using RSS? RSS is a standard format to syndicate Internet content, not just blogs or podcasts, but any type of content. Podcasting clearly shows that feeds can be media-rich, and while podcasting is generally considered a medium for entertainment, the educational value of podcasting has not been lost on many educational institutions. The business community has been a little slower to embrace the power and importance of RSS as a communication medium, but industry leaders are gradually adopting it as a new and powerful method of communication. But back to the original point... RSS can deliver virtually any type of content, including spreadsheets, power point applications, database updates, video tutorial, and much more. The true value of RSS feeds is that the subscriber can review and evaluate the information at a time and place of their own choosing.

What Can be Published Using RSS Feeds?

Citizen journalists and writers have become common place on the web. Perhaps you are considering blogging, but are unsure of how to enter the world of online journaling. As the medium has grown, I thought it might be a good idea to put together some general guidelines for new bloggers and reminders to veteran bloggers about blogging practices.

There is no Emily Post in blogging that offers etiquette advice, or a Miss Manners that details appropriate behavior. That does not mean there are not acceptable and unacceptable actions that bloggers should take. In order to efficiently communicate as a blogger on the Internet, it is critical to understand the unwritten rules of blogging etiquette.

RSS Feed Etiquette

More and more companies are using RSS as a means to communicate, so having an RSS feed that is professional and well polished will help differentiate your company from your competition. What makes an RSS feed professional? Follow these simple steps to polish your RSS feed and take it to the next level...

1. Feed Image
Add an image to your RSS feed. The image will be displayed by many feed readers each time your feed is displayed. This will help build and reinforce your brand or image in the minds of people who read your RSS feed. Adding an image to an RSS feed is relatively easy, and adds a level of professionalism.

Create Professional RSS Feeds

If you are struggling with the decision of whether to implement RSS feeds or not, consider the following pros and cons for webmasters who use RSS feeds as part of their content and communication plan...

Benefits (Pros Of Using RSS)
The benefits for a webmaster who opts to implement RSS feeds on their website are numerous:

1. Saves Time
RSS feeds save time. RSS subscribers can quickly scan RSS feeds, without having to visit each and every website. Subscribers can then click on any items they are interested in, to get additional information.

2. Timely
RSS feeds are timely. RSS feeds will automatically update themselves any time new information is posted, so the information your subscribers receive via their RSS reader or news aggregator is timely.

Pros and Cons of RSS Feeds

Academia has embraced RSS as a means to educate, but scrutinizing how educational institutions are using RSS feeds in their daily routines show RSS is utilized can vary across different industries.

1. Share Resources
Academics are using social bookmarking websites to share quality websites that relate to their area of expertise with colleagues and students.

Academia Adds RSS Feeds to Their Teaching Tool Kit

Daily more and more realtors are turning to RSS as a tool to market homes for sale. The growing RSS phenomenon in the realty market makes perfect sense. Unlike email RSS feeds have a 100% delivery rate. In addition the costs involved in creating and managing an RSS feed are insignificant when compared to the print advertising Realtors spend on each week. Imagine the amount spent each week to promote various properties in circulars and weekly newspapers, compared to the costs associated with updating and managing an RSS feed.

Realtors Employ RSS Feeds to Sell Homes

Here are some general guidelines for creating RSS Feeds:

1. Enclosures
Include only one enclosure per item for maximum compatibility. The RSS 2.0 specification does not clearly state whether multiple enclosures are allowed or not, but most RSS readers will only support a single enclosure. Therefore, it is best to conform to the readers, and only include a single enclosure in each RSS feed item.

2. Date Formats
Date formats can be very tricky; be sure that all dates are properly formatted.

3. Encoding
Encoding is required for certain characters. If you are using software to create the feed, it should handle character encoding for you.

Etiquette for RSS Feeds

1.) Build a Feed
There are a number of desktop and web applications available that make feed creation easy. I would encourage anyone creating a feed to use one. Though not overly complicated, hand-coding an RSS feed can become a bit confusing and time-consuming. Most desktop software applications for building a feed include a wizard and contact-sensitive help, simplifying the process of creating a feed. Following a few simple steps in a wizard generally will produce an RSS feed in just a few minutes.

Publishers control what information is syndicated in the RSS feed, so ultimately it is the publisher's decision as to whether to include teaser copy or full articles. Consider what you are trying to accomplish and who your target audience is when building the feed.

Steps to Creating & Promoting an RSS Feed

You have an RSS feed and you have worked hard to get the word out. According to your logs you have subscribers! Now the hard part: how to retain the subscribers to your RSS feed. Follow these simple steps to insure that your subscriber base will grow.

1. Original Content
A consistent stream of original content will do well to earn subscribers loyalty. The best RSS feeds provide content that is compelling and unique. Do not rehash existing content, look for a unique angle or spin if you wish to cover something that is hot in the blogosphere.

2. Quality Over Frequency
A posts quality is far more important than a post's frequency. Readers will tire of rambling or nonsensical posts that contain no real value. Time is precious and there are plenty of feeds and blogs, in order to retain readers provide quality not quantity.

13 Tips to Maintaining an RSS Feed Subscriber Base

Just as the second generation of search engines and directories evolved into niche topic specific portals we are seeing the same occur in the area of RSS feed directories and search engines. While some directories are admittedly more niche than others the trend is obvious.

Why Niche RSS Feeds Matter

RSS is a standard for syndicating content on the Internet. RSS feeds are used in a variety of ways to distribute all types of content via the Internet. The benefits for individuals subscribing to RSS feeds have resulted in a rapid growth and adoption rate. Software and tools have made RSS feed creation and management easy, even for non-technical individuals, which has also fueled the growth of RSS feeds.

Create RSS | Make RSS Feeds

eGovLinks, the e-Government starting point, is featuring two news feeds on its home page and site navigation bar, and both are from Utah State Government!

The State of Delaware has two new RSS newsfeeds featured by links right off the state's homepage. As lead of the team that developed the feeds, I'm pleased to report this as a joint effort of our office, the Government Information Center (GIC) and the Register of Regulations.

The first feed, Delaware.gov - Statewide News is a general collection of news and press releases from across state agencies.

The Current Monthly Register is the newsfeed equivalent of the The Delaware Register of Regulations, a monthly publication of all proposed regulatory changes, general notices, and final regulations from our partners in the Legislature.

The Government Information Center is the office that manages the state portal, Delaware.gov. The mission of the GIC is to develop and deliver accurate and complete governmental information online. The office works with state agencies, legislators, the public and others to improve the delivery of government services and information through Delaware.gov and other channels.

The Wisconsin Historical Society reports to Jenny Levine that they now offer three new RSS feeds. Web Development Coordinator James Ellis says that his is the first government agency in Wisconsin to use this technology.

The National Association of Legislative Information Technology (NALIT) will be sharing "Web Tips, Tricks and Techniques" for building Legislative RSS feeds at their 2004 Professional Development Seminar in beautiful Burlington, Vermont, September 8-11, 2004. Panelists include key IT players from Virginia, Nevada, and Utah. Several states are now using RSS to provide users with notices of new Web content or to distribute newsletters. At least two states are now generating legislative feeds directly from databases. This article previews some of what they'll be showing from the states of Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island.

Today I was working on the WordCamp.LA site. I was trying to show the “attendee list” on the attendees page with out having to update the page every day. Since I am using EventBrite to promote and sell ticket to the event I can collect info from there list. Evey one who purchases a ticket […]

The post Use WordPress to print a RSS feed for Eventbrite attendees appeared first on WPCult.

Last week I wrote how to “Use WordPress to print a RSS feed for Eventbrite attendees“. It was pretty popular, but then I found myself in a place that was more annoying. Trying to incorporate that into a blog post or page. Without having to download a plugin that will allow PHP to be executed […]

The post Turn your RSS feed into a shortcode appeared first on WPCult.

The RSS feeds of the RSS-Public and RSS-Board mailing lists are no longer available. Yahoo Groups used to offer feeds for each of its public lists, but Yahoo dropped support last year. A member of the service's product team said the feature was retired in July 2013.

To read the lists and subscribe to receive them in email, visit the Yahoo Groups pages for RSS-Public and RSS-Board.

We may move the lists to Google Groups, which does offer RSS feeds for each group.

The distributed social network Mastodon has grown to 12.8 million user accounts, supporting itself through user donations and a lot of effort by the volunteers running servers. There's no CEO changing the network at whim, no ads and no algorithms that manipulate what you see to increase engagement. Just a scroll of posts by the people you follow pulled from all over the world.

Every Mastodon account has an RSS feed that can be found by going to the user's Mastodon page and adding ".rss" to the URL of that page. For example, the RSS feed for Bonaventure Software is at this address:

https://mastodon.online/@bonaventuresoft.rss

The feeds are valid RSS and use the Media-RSS and Webfeeds namespaces.

The Media-RSS content element contains the photo, audio or video included in the Mastodon post, if one is present:

The Webfeeds icon element holds the URL of the user's avatar:

One potential improvement to the feed would be to add a link element from the Atom namespace to identify the URL of the RSS feed, as in this example:

That might not happen anytime soon. Mastodon is a frenetic open source project with 61 open issues and suggestions involving RSS.

If you need to load an RSS feed with the PHP programming language, the open source library SimplePie greatly simplifies the process of pulling in items from a feed to present on a website, store in a database or do something else coooool with the data. There's a full installation guide for SimplePie but you can skip it with just three steps:

1. Download SimplePie 1.5.
2. Copy the file autoloader.php and the folder library to a folder that's accessible from your PHP code.
3. Make note of this folder; you'll be using require_once() to load autoloader.php from that location.

SimplePie has been designed to work the same regardless a feed's format. It supports RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom and the earlier versions of RSS. Additionally it can read feed elements from nine namespaces.

Here's PHP code that loads feed items from the news site Techdirt and displays them in HTML:

// load the SimplePie library
require_once('/var/www/libraries/simplepie-1.5/autoloader.php');

// load the feed
$feed = new SimplePie();
$feed->set_feed_url('https://www.techdirt.com/feed/');
$feed->init();
$feed->handle_content_type();

// create the output
$html_output = '';
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {
  $html_output .= '<p><a href="' . $item->get_link() . '">' . $item->get_title() . '</a></p>';
  $html_output .= $item->get_description();
  $html_output .= '<p>By ' . $item->get_author(0)->get_name() . ', ' . $item->get_date();
}

// display the output
ECHO <<<END
$html_output
END;


The API documentation for SimplePie_Item lists the functions that can extract data from each feed item. The versatility of the library is demonstrated by get_authors(), which can retrieve an item's authorship information whether it was in the RSS author element, Dublin Core creator, iTunes author, or Atom author.

SimplePie supports caching so that a feed isn't downloaded every time code is executed. The addition of these lines turns on caching, specifies the location of a cache folder and sets the time to use a cached version to four hours (14,400 seconds):

$feed->set_cache_location('/var/www/cache/');
$feed->set_cache_duration(14400);
$feed->enable_cache();

SimplePie was created by RSS Advisory Board member Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon and Ryan McCue. The project is currently maintained on GitHub by Malcom Blaney.

There are a lot of libraries for processing XML data with Java that can be used to read RSS feeds. One of the best is the open source library XOM created by the computer book author Elliotte Rusty Harold.

As he wrote one of his 20 books about Java and XML, Harold got so frustrated with the available Java libraries for XML that he created his own. XOM, which stands for XML Object Model, was designed to be easy to learn while still being strict about XML, requiring documents that are well-formed and utilize namespaces in complete adherence to the specification. (At the RSS Advisory Board, talk of following a spec is our love language.)

XOM was introduced in 2002 and is currently up to version 1.3.9, though all versions have remained compatible since 1.0. To use XOM, download the class library in one of the packages available on the XOM homepage. You can avoid needing any further configuration by choosing one of the options that includes third-party JAR files in the download. This allows XOM to use an included SAX parser under the hood to process XML.

Here's Java code that loads items from The Guardian's RSS 2.0 feed containing articles by Ben Hammersley, displaying them as HTML output:

// create an XML builder and load the feed using a URL
Builder bob = new Builder();
Document doc = bob.build("https://www.theguardian.com/profile/benhammersley/rss");
// load the root element and channel
Element rss = doc.getRootElement();
Element channel = rss.getFirstChildElement("channel");
// load all items in the channel
Elements items = channel.getChildElements("item");
for (Element item : items) {
  // load elements of the item
  String title = item.getFirstChildElement("title").getValue();
  String author = item.getFirstChildElement("creator",
    "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/").getValue();
  String description = item.getFirstChildElement("description").getValue();
  // display the output
  System.out.println(">h2>" + title + ">/h2>");
  System.out.println(">p>>b>By " + author + ">/b>>/p>");
  System.out.println(">p>" + description + ">/p>");

All of the classes used in this code are in the top-level package nu.xom, which has comprehensive JavaDoc describing their use. Like all Java code this is a little long-winded, but Harold's class names do a good job of explaining what they do. A Builder uses its build() method with a URL as the argument to load a feed into a Document over the web. There are also other build methods to load a feed from a file, reader, input stream, or string.

Elements can be retrieved by their names such as "title", "link" or "description". An element with only one child of a specific type can be retrieved using the getFirstChildElement() method with the name as the argument:

Element linkElement = item.getFirstChildElement("link");

An element containing multiple children of the same type uses getChildElements() instead:

Elements enclosures = item.getChildElements("enclosure");
if (enclosures.size() > 1) {
  System.out.println("I'm pretty sure an item should only include one enclosure");
}

If an element is in a namespace, there must be a second argument providing the namespace URI. Like many RSS feeds, the ones from The Guardian use a dc:creator element from Dublin Core to credit the item's author. That namespace has the URI "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/".

If the element specified in getFirstChildElement() or getChild Elements() is not present, those methods return null. You may need to check for this when adapting the code to load other RSS feeds.

If the name Ben Hammersley sounds familiar, he coined the term "podcasting" in his February 2004 article for The Guardian about the new phenomenon of delivering audio files in RSS feeds.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) for receiving updated psychology web content and subscribing to AssessmentPsychology.com.

For users who would like to selectively read our latest News and announcement, check out our RSS feed at http://www.newlook.com.sg/rss/news.xml in XML format. Other sources of RSS feeds and free News reader downloads and aggregators are also suggested.