How To Create An RSS Feed

If you want to increase the readership on your website, or you want to make it big with a podcast, you need an RSS feed. The RSS feed keeps your users up to date on all of your latest articles or episodes and can result in a massive increase in traffic. Creating an RSS feed is quick and easy, whether you’re using an RSS creation program or writing one yourself. Follow this guide to find out how.

What Is An RSS Feed?

In the simplest of terms, an RSS feed is a list of entries. In other words, each item on your RSS feed has a link attached to it, which takes you to a URL that has more information. RSS takes the content from a web page and pushes it into a list, which the user can browse through. The user can subscribe to multiple RSS feeds, and the list of new entries to each list is pushed each time there is a new post from a specific website.

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Although creating an RSS feed can be a bit confusing, there are a few places you can go to find free tools that you can use to create one. Use one of the following links to start the process:

FeedNotifier
Tickler
Email Attachment To RSS
RSSDevelopers.

What Do I Need To Know About RSS Feeds?

After you create an RSS feed on WordPress, you’ll need to remember to update your Feedly account to the news feed. Feedly is the RSS service that you will use for your podcast feed.

Once you’ve updated Feedly, you need to publish a podcast feed on SoundCloud. To do this, search for your podcast and select Create Feed.

Now, you’ll need to publish a Feedly feed on iTunes or Google Play Music and make it public. You can change the Public or Private settings to be Public or Private.

Now, you need to configure your RSS reader. You can use an RSS Reader, but we recommend Feedly. You’ll need to install a plugin called Feedly Auto Trigger. After it’s installed, just open Feedly and select the button to add a new podcast feed. You can also add a feed from iTunes or Google Play Music.

How To Make An RSS Feed

#1- Choosing the RSS Feed Template

Once you’ve chosen your desired RSS feed, the next thing to do is decide on a template. Luckily, there are thousands to choose from. A wide variety of these templates will come in handy to help your users understand the information you are providing to them. Here are a few of the most common RSS Feed templates.

#2- Time-Fills RSS

You may want to create a feed to let your users know about all of your latest articles, or perhaps your upcoming blog posts. This is known as time-fills RSS and is very popular. These blogs can help you, as well as your followers, keep up to date on your content.

#3- Calendar RSS

The next few RSS feed templates, however, are calendar RSS feeds.

How To Add An RSS Feed To My Website

There are tons of free RSS creation tools to choose from, such as Feedburner, Blogia, and Feedbin, but many of them require a monthly or yearly subscription fee. If you want to use a free service, you can use a tool like Feedbin, which lets you create an RSS feed quickly and simply.

To set up Feedbin on your website, visit the Feedbin web page, click Create and enter your website URL. Feedbin will then search the internet for RSS feeds and add all of your latest articles and podcasts to your feed. Feedburner offers a free version of its service, and it also comes in two paid versions.

Tools Of The Trade

You’ll need a couple of tools to get started with an RSS feed. The simplest tool is a text editor. These work for a number of common platforms (like WordPress, WordPress, and Drupal), and they’re pretty easy to use.

The first one is called Feed Reader. If you want to use a text editor with a very simple interface, Feed Reader is the program for you. With Feed Reader, you can create an RSS feed for virtually any site. It can be used in an easy-to-use program or used by simply pressing enter. FeedReader is completely free, and you can download it on most computers.

Feedly is another tool that you may find handy. You’ll need a pay subscription to use it, but it’s a powerful tool and can do quite a bit.

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Adding A Feed Icon To Your Website

Adding a small RSS icon to your website is one of the most important steps to take if you want to attract the attention of the readers on a regular basis. These icons are known as RSS badges, and many websites, like ThinkDifferently, have created logos for their RSS feeds to use. These badges are clearly visible and they can improve your website’s SEO and reach more potential readers.

Sharing Your RSS Feed On Social Media

Once you’ve created an RSS feed, you need to share it with the world. One of the most important websites to share your RSS feed on is Reddit, as it is one of the biggest social media sites out there. You can search Reddit for your feed using the Search Box at the top right corner of your page, or simply click the blue share button.

Integrating With Other Programs

The RSS feeds created in WordPress, Bing News, and Joomla are great for allowing your listeners to find your work and easily subscribe to your site. But if you want your podcast to be fully integrated with other programs and services, you need to integrate it with a third-party website or application.

If you’re looking to do this for a specific application, you’ll probably want to look into utilizing Feedbin or Feedmonkey. Both services will allow you to easily import and export your podcast feed and can be used to automatically manage the newsletter subscription emails sent from your site.

Why Should I Create An RSS Feed?

The first thing you should consider is why you should do this. Your answer should be short and easy. The answer should either be ‘because it’s easy, or ‘because it’s one of the most important tools on the internet. If it’s the former, great! You don’t need an RSS feed. If it’s the latter, great! You need an RSS feed.

But What Are RSS Feeds?

You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘serve your audience’ many times. What this means is this: if your website or product does something to your audience, you should be doing it in a way they want to receive it. That can mean in your mobile app, on social media, via email, or by other forms of communication. But where to send it?

So, we know that all of the above is how you’re going to reach your audience. How to do it is another thing entirely.

Best RSS Feed Plugin For WordPress

The HTML5 Drag and Drop RSS Plugin WordPress plugin offers a more professional look to your website with its straight text. It’s very similar to the popular WordPress RSS3 Drag and Drop Feed plugin.

There are many plugins out there to do RSS but you should go with a simple subscription widget that will add a little more style to your blog.

If you want to put a premium style on your RSS feeds, then check out this premium RSS plugin by ZanyBlog. It’s free and comes with a nice design.

Off-The-Shelf RSS Create Tool

If you don’t want to write your own RSS feed plugin, you can use a pre-written RSS feed creator. It’s designed to look a bit like the official WordPress RSS feed but it also has a slick interface.

Creating A Feed With WordPress Without A Plugin

If you don’t want to spend money on an RSS plugin or book, then you can also create an RSS feed with WordPress in a few easy steps. If you’re on a budget, you can create an RSS feed from scratch in only a few minutes. Follow our guide for creating an RSS feed with WordPress without a plugin.

Adding RSS Feeds To A Theme’s Pages

If you’re building a theme with a different publishing backend, you’ll have to add the ability to include an RSS feed to the pages you want to add it to. You can add the RSS feed to a blog or a business page with just a few simple steps.

As previously mentioned, podcasting programs, such as I Heart Radio and Apple Podcasts, are excellent for both podcast creators and listeners. They allow for easy podcast creation and running of the podcast itself, but what about RSS feed creation? This is where a good podcasting program comes into play. Below is a description of how to create an RSS feed with Apple Podcasts.

Step 1. Enter Your Podcast Name Into The App

Open the Apple Podcast app and click on the “Search” icon located in the bottom left corner. Enter your podcast name into the search box and choose “Shows”. This is the section where you’ll find all of the podcasts in the iTunes library that you’ve created and/or subscribed to.

Step 2. Creating A Podcast Feed With iTunes

Podcasts have become extremely popular. So popular, in fact, that iTunes will automatically add them to a new iTunes album. It can be a good way of reaching out to people who might not be interested in the blog or other social media channels. But making the conversion is easy and you don’t have to know any coding. Follow this guide to learn how.

Combining RSS And iTunes

RSS feeds and iTunes albums are two different things, but you can combine them. We’ve already explained how you can do this, but we’ll explain it again in order to make sure you don’t get it wrong. We’ll explain the basics of iTunes albums and then use that information to create an RSS feed.

Creating An RSS Feed With PHP

There are a ton of software packages out there that can create an RSS feed. Many of them include plenty of instructions on how to get started, as well as how to set up basic feeds for many different website domains. If you have any experience with PHP, you can use it to create an RSS feed in no time at all.

We’ve put together a comprehensive PHP resource to help you get your feed running. It includes detailed instructions and even comes with a demo example.

After this short tutorial, you should be able to create an RSS feed for your site and make sure all your readers receive it in no time.

Why Use A WordPress RSS Feed Plugin?

RSS Feeds allow websites to publish content in an XML file format. This allows users to subscribe to content using RSS feed readers, like Feedly.

By default, WordPress publishes RSS feeds for your blog posts, categories, authors, and more.

Apart from reading, RSS feeds can also be used to pull content from one website and display it anywhere else.

You may want to use an RSS feed plugin to curate content from different websites that you like. You can also automatically pull the latest content from social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to display them in WordPress.

While WordPress comes with an RSS widget built-in, it does not let you customize the display to add thumbnails, social buttons, etc. This is why most people use an RSS plugin for the added functionality.

Creating A Feed With Audacity

Audacity is an awesome free and open source program. It is an audio editor for all types of media including music, video, photos and text. Audacity is fully configurable so you can change all of the parameters as you like to suit your needs.

In this tutorial, we will go through the process of creating an RSS feed. This could be one for your personal blog or a podcast for your business. We will need the audio file for the podcast. Open Audacity, click File -> Import – to import a file into Audacity. Click Browse -> Use A File – select a folder. Click Import – add the audio file to the library. Click OK – click Close.

Now we need to tell Audacity where to send the new RSS feed. In the File -> Settings dialogue box, click on “Publish Feed URL” – enter your RSS feed’s URL.

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Make Your RSS Feed Dynamic

Now, this would require a fair bit of programming. If you are not confident with your programming skills, I suggest you'd be better off using a CMS like Joomla, Drupal, or best of all, WordPress (if that suits you). CMSes have a number of plug-ins for RSS feeds, and most of them even offer RSS functionality right out of the box. However, since you are reading this, I assume you are brewing your own solution and so let's get coding.

You can use the same programming language that you have used to program your site. The concept, regardless of programming language, is going to be the same. You'll store set number of items that you wrote to the RSS feed during the last update to your site database. This database gets updated each time you publish a new page or blog entry. Each time your “RSS update” script runs, you'll read those values from the database and write them to the file.

All we are going to do is to fetch the entries from the database and insert them into the appropriate tags. I can only briefly outline the steps because the actual code would vary according to the programming language you are using. The following code snippets are courtesy of WebReference.com, so for the full details while you're writing your own code, make sure to go through those details.

Easier Alternatives To Creating An RSS Feed

Over the years there have been a lot of developments around RSS technology. No one really needs to create a manual RSS feed anymore, since there are so many services that can take any website and convert it into a dynamically updated RSS feed. Here are a few services online that will accomplish this (not all are free).

FetchRSS: This site lets you define elements of any web page you want to monitor for updates, and create an RSS feed out of it by clicking on elements of the page.

Feed Creator: This service, created by FiveFilters.org, lets you type in the page URL, and filters for guide or class attribute or URL segments.

Feed43: This allows you to pull in HTML from any web page and create snippets for filters that identify any new items on the page. The free version lets you create limited item feeds that update every six hours or more.

Feedity: This service is similar to FetchRSS in that it lets you graphically highlight sections of a web page to monitor for updates.

Get Your RSS Feed On

There's a misconception that RSS is old technology, but it's remained a core part of the web for a reason. It's why most CMS systems integrated RSS generation into their core package. That's because RSS is the easiest method available to let your fans and readers subscribe to receive notifications whenever your site updates.

That keeps your visitors coming back and loyal. So make use of RSS, even if only a small portion of your visitors want it. After all, loyal visitors are hard to come by.

How To Set Up A Podcast RSS Feed

Add the PowerPress plugin to your WordPress site
Publish your podcast as a post through the PowerPress plugin
Click on “submit your podcast to iTunes and other podcast directories”
Copy the URL provided to you and submit it to the podcast clients of your choice
On the other hand, if you’re doing all this manually, then you’ll want to follow these steps:
Copy the example podcast feed provided by Apple
Fill in your podcast information, such as title, author, etc.
Add “items” for each episode containing a link to the audio file and fill in the information, such as the episode title, description and publishing date, in the relevant fields
Host the XML file you’ve created somewhere on the website
Submit the XML file’s URL to various podcast clients

Conclusion

By following these instructions, you should be able to set up a dedicated RSS feed for whatever type of content you distribute. Although the RSS format certainly isn’t as popular or widespread as it once was, it remains an incredibly useful way to ensure that your audience doesn’t miss out on any of your content, thus greatly increasing your traffic and views.

In this tutorial, you learned how to create an RSS feed from scratch. Using our tools, we created a feed that you can download and use. If you are looking to produce a podcast, you can create an RSS feed to feed your listeners’ downloads from the podcast. You can also use an RSS provider to create one to submit for syndication. Whatever your needs, the tools are available to create and use your own RSS feed.

The last few sections of this article are broken into sections to make it easier for you to find what you are looking for. If you have any comments or questions, please use the comments section below or email us at support@webtrends.com.

I trust you enjoyed this article about Everything To Know About RSS Feeds. Would you please stay tuned for more articles to come? Take care!

JeannetteZ

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