Website promotion via RSS

The term RSS is often used by simplification to refer to syndication formats of sites or blogs, which, however, are diverse. Several became popular: Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary and Atom.
Syndication is enjoyed by news outlets (Reuters, AFP) online magazines... And soon you will do it yourself! So that we know your articles and that you mostly get backlinks, this is a search tool, but there are many other uses...

Using RSS

Along with articles and news, RSS is becoming widespread and finding new uses every day.
The company launches a new product, information becomes a flow element. The website distributes small ads, so it is convenient to place them in a streaming file as an easily distributed newspaper. We want to publish changes within the site or software, we publish their list in the channel. The same applies to error reports or product release dates. Nothing prohibits him from finding new applications.
This means that on an important site you can already find not an RSS file, but a number, depending on various uses. An example is a Sourceforge.net site that offers flow for new projects, for the most visited, for project categories, etc.
The RSS format allows you to use many extensions from the standard database, the description of which will be given below.

General description

I wonder how simple the RSS 2.0 format looks. It is limited by the minimum general structure, which looks like this:

<rss>
    <channel>
        <item> </item>
        <item> </item>
        ...
    </channel>
</rss>

The root container is rss. It specifies a channel that is a website and a list of items corresponding to articles or any other content that is advertised.
The channel and each element contain a list of descriptive tags that are the same:

<title> Le titre de l'article.
<link> L'URL.
<description> Un résumé.
<pubDate> Optionnellement la date de publication.

This gives us the following, more detailed, but nevertheless simple general structure:

<channel>
    <title> ... </title>
    <link> ... </link>
    <description> ... </description>
    <item>
       <title> ... </title>
       <link> ... </link>
       <description> ... </description>
    </item>
    <item>
        ... 
    </item>
    etc.
</channel>

They say that programming a script to extract information from such an elementary format, or to display the stream itself, should not be very difficult! In fact, scripts are any fact provided on this site, they are given in the resources section at the end of the page.
The basic format can be extended with specialized modules.
We have described the RSS 2.0 format, the specifications of which are available in French on this site, but there are other formats.

Select Format

Even if you limit yourself to three main formats, this is a dilemma for the webmaster, what format should he use?
Simplifying a little, here are the advantages of each format:

  1. RSS 2.0
     It is very simple and expandable and suitable for any use.
  2. Atom
    It is accurate and unambiguous and can be automatically processed by developed software.
  3. RSS RDF 1.0
     It is designed to integrate into the semantic network and its online tools.

For a more detailed comparison of these formats, see the article "Which syndication format should I choose?"

Means

Regardless of format, there are many tools to automatically display or create a syndication wire.

Indication

The RSS feed can be shown through a fresh browser, which automatically (almost) recognizes the presence of a file and therefore frees up specialized aggregators.
But you can also show the feed inside the page, be it the site page itself or news from another site. To do this, this site provides several scripts, that is, a common player that recognizes the three mentioned formats.

Generation

If your site is a blog or CMS, and therefore you use page management software such as Dotkler, Jumla, etc., you have the function of creating a stream from the start.
But they have a flaw too vestigial, limited to listing the last 15 notes or items and no choice.
In order to go further, and choose elements for promotion and compose the stream yourself, software without analogues is available on .fr, this is an ARA editor.

Statement

If you want to make sure that your file is well trained and in strict XML format, you can go through the verification stage if you wish. RSS validators are available online, including Feed Validator.

Show Stream

After the file is created, verified, posted on the site, the browsers have yet to tell about its existence.

For the latest browsers displaying RSS feeds, you need to make a small change to the home page (or folder page) of the site.
Inside the HEAD section of the page, add the following line:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
      href="https://www.iqlevsha.ru/rss.xml" title="Votre titre">

Of course, you replace the iqlevsha.ru for the domain of your site, as well as the file name and name.
If the file format is atom, you also replace rss + xml with:

atom+xml

For readers, add a link to the file using an image, small or large.

<a href="https://www.iqlevsha.ru/rss.xml><img src="rss.gif">Votre texte</a>

All that remains is to tell the web community about the existence of the tape, a few tracks below...

RSS, Promotion Tool

You think that your articles reflect the news, provide unique information. News aggregators are here to claim them. Wikio for blogs, for example, extracts information from RSS feeds and automatically classifies tickets into the desired category.

Many services have developed around RSS: general and specialized directories of channels, or you yourself register your stream, specialized search engines or a social network site.

RSS was one of the most important components of Web 2.0. An indispensable SEO tool allows you to increase site traffic and get backlinks. While still useful for certain types of sites that need to get their news to an engaged audience, her interest is less obvious these days.

Participation in the blogosphere

W3C, an organization that defines web standards including HTML and XML, still operates in silence, developing a project that is little talked about, but applications are gradually emerging, it is a semantic network. It's about giving the meaning of web pages, what they're used for, their context, in a form that a computer can handle. It already has several standards, including the widespread RDF format.

Other components of the blogosphere are OPML, which describes the plan, resume, feed list, website menu, and therefore allows you to distribute it, blogroll, a list of favorite blogs that can be promoted through RSS feed and other formats.

The podcast involves the placement of audio and video files on the site, and syndication is used to popularize them. In this case, the RSS file contains a link, title, date, description of each video or audio file. Thanks to the so-called podcasting, in this way you can immediately download selected songs from the advertising stream.

For the blogger, all this is somewhat outdated due to the use of social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which make the same type of service without the need to manage complex formats, but for a commercial or professional site, RSS is an important means of information.

Editeur RSS

RSS Feed Editor