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Using feeds to increase your sites content
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By Rob Sullivan
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There are many ways to increase content on your site, frommanually creating it to purchasing software which will autogenerate it for you.
While I highly recommend you stay away from anything which isautomatically generated I also understand that many people don'tfeel comfortable writing.
Therefore, in this article I look at another way to make yoursite appear as if its changing. That is, incorporating feedsinto your site to improve return visits and build your brand.
Feeds have been growing in popularity for some time. In fact,there are people who measure such popularity.
While feeds are not the sole property of blogs, we can gauge howpopular feeds are simply by looking at the "state of theblogosphere."
According to Technorati, the blogosphere is doubling every 5months or so. That means that 5 months from now there will betwice as many blogs (and feeds) as there are now.
In many cases, the only way to access that content, aside fromregularly visiting a site, is through their feeds.
But that's not the only use for feeds. Many services have sprungup which allow you to search and aggregate those feeds. Servicessuch as Feedster and even Google News allow you to search forphrases and output an RSS feed which could then be imported intoa feed reader.
In other words, if you wanted to get the most recent news aboutGoogle from Google News you could search for "Textlinkbrokers"in Google News and then copy the RSS feed URL into your favoritenews reader.
Now I know what you're thinking: "Well that's great news, buthow does that help with my site?"
Well now that you know how to auto generate feeds for virtuallyany topic you want, you can then import the feeds into your siteusing various methods.
Inserting Feeds into your site
Obviously you can't just link to the feed, or paste the XMLoutput into your pages. It wouldn't be readable. What you needis some tool to convert the feed into something that isreadable. And there are many out there to do just that.
So let's look at the easiest - a Javascript from a hostedservice like FeedRoll.
Using a service like FeedRoll you can input the URL of the feedyou want, make some basic style changes and it will provide youwith a Javascript you can then install on your site pages thatwill display the feed within your page content. One problem Ihave with FeedRoll is that you are limited to the list of feedsthey provide. There was a time when you could use any feed URLbut they've since changed it.
The only other way to use FeedRoll with your own feed is to buytheir software package which will allow you to export the feedinto HTML code that you can paste on your site.
However, if the feed you do like is in the list, then you couldsimply make the style changes you want, copy the Javascript codeonto your page(s) and you are done. Once you've saved the page,load it in your browser and voila - you have regularly updatingnews headlines on the page.
But what if you want something a little more sophisticated?
Well there are options here as well including ASP and PHP basedcode which can take a live feed and format it on the fly.
Therefore, if you have a dynamic site and don't mind monkeyingaround in the code this may be the solution for you.
Using PHP to display feeds
The benefit of using PHP to display RSS is that the contents ofthe feed displayed on the page can be spidered and indexed bysearch engines. That means links can be followed. That alsomeans that if you have your own feed, you can place it on yourhome page (for example) to offer crawlers quick and easy accessto your latest new content.
One of my favorite PHP based converters is called CaRP. Thereare both free and commercial versions which allow you to notonly display the feed as HTML but also customize it any way youwant with style formatting and even images displayed in feeds(much like you see on Google News now).
It can be a little tricky to set up at first as it isn'tstrictly PHP but once you start playing around with the valuesyou begin to realize just how flexible it is.
I know I use it on a personal site to display no only latestindustry news but also my most recent blog posts and forumentries. This way crawlers can get into that new content quicklythrough direct links on the home page.
Using ASP to display feeds
Just like the PHP example above there is also an ASP scriptwhich will take an RSS feed and output it as static HTML.
My favorite is this feed converter which also allows you someleeway in outputting the feed the way you see fit.
If you are comfortable with ASP you will see how easy it is tomanipulate the script to suit you. Even if you aren't an ASPguru you'll find the script fairly easy to implement withcommented prompts throughout the script telling you how to makeit work.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways to display feeds on sites -from hosted services to scripts embedded in ASP or PHP. Reallythe only thing limiting you is your ability and imagination.
I can tell you from experience that I've used all the aboveversions and I'm happy with each of them.
Also, because they will take any feed, your options for what youwant to show are also only limited by your ability andimagination.
For example, I use the ASP one on an ASP site to display recentnews from Google News. I have pages set up that pull Google newsinto a Google page, Yahoo! News into a Yahoo! Page and so on.
With the PHP (CaRP) script, I have the most recent blog postsand forum entries displayed on the home page of my site to helpcrawlers find the new content quickly.
With clients who have limited abilities or technical supportI've implemented hosted versions as they are much easier to do.
So my recommendation to you is try them out and find the onethat best suits you. If you don't like the ones I've suggestedhere a simple search on your favorite search engine shouldreturn you lots of different options.
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